Modeling Violence against Women in India: Theories and Problems

This paper examined the following issues: 1. Is ‘violence against women’ a variable? What kind of variable is it? 2. Is it theoretically plausible to model ‘violence against women’? 3. If it is theoretically plausible to model ‘violence against women’, then is it feasible to estimate such a model and perform simulation exercises? Following are findings: 1. The decision to perpetrate ‘violence against women’ is a binary variable, which takes value unity (1) when the decision is ‘yes’ and zero (0) when the decision is ‘no’. 2. It is theoretically plausible to construct the models of estimating and forecasting the probability of occurrence of ‘violence against women’ facing a typical woman in a particular society on the basis of necessary information. 3. It is not feasible in practice to apply above models for the purposes of policy-formulation and policy-simulation in India because of absence of compilation or systematic compilation of the data on ‘violence against women’ and the variables determining ‘violence against women’.