Cumulative Violence and Young Women's Unfreedom

Drawing on life course and feminist sociological perspectives, our study had two aims. The first was to trace the accumulation of violence in women’s lives from childhood through young adulthood. The second was to examine how cumulative experiences of violence relate to young women’s risks of being ‘unfree’. To achieve our aims, we analyzed six waves of data from the 1989-1995 birth cohort of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health (n = 8,629 women). To operationalize women’s unfreedom, we created a measure of multidimensional disadvantage. This captured women’s deprivations in material, education, employment, health, and social domains. We estimated growth models in the multilevel framework to assess women’s trajectories of multidimensional disadvantage from ages 18 to 29, conditioned on their childhood experiences of violence and economic hardship. We then examined the impacts of intimate partner violence on women’s trajectories. Last, we tested the effects of cumulative violence on women’s risks of being unfree. In a society in which gender equality remains a promise yet to be realized, our results show that women’s roads to unfreedom are often paved with violence. We conclude that if gender inequalities in power, participation, and resources persist, so too will the scourge of violence against women. This will in turn ensure that gender inequalities remain entrenched. This is the cycle that must be broken.