Mexico 2021: Psychological Intimate Partner Violence Against Women and the Role of Childhood Violence Exposure -- A Machine Learning Approach

2025-07-30

AI Summary

This study investigates risk and protective factors for psychological intimate partner violence (IPV) against women in Mexico in 2021, with a focus on intergenerational transmission of childhood violence exposure. Drawing on an ecological framework, it integrates variables across individual, relational, community, and societal levels, combining data from the Mexican National Survey on Dynamics of Household Relationships with nine supplementary datasets to construct a multidimensional analytical dataset. Variable selection and modeling employed model-based gradient boosting and stability selection. Key findings indicate that childhood violence exposure among both partners significantly increases the risk of psychological IPV; conversely, later voluntary first marriage, women’s economic and occupational decision-making autonomy, and men’s participation in domestic labor emerge as robust protective factors. This study is the first to systematically validate and extend these three protective factors using large-scale, nationally representative Mexican data, underscoring the centrality of intergenerational violence mechanisms and providing rigorous evidence to inform targeted policy interventions.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Cooperative Game Theory
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

In 2021, psychological violence was the most prevalent form of intimate partner violence (IPV) suffered by women in Mexico. The consequences of psychological IPV can include low self-esteem, depression, and even potential suicide. It is, therefore, crucial to identify the most relevant risk and protective factors of psychological IPV against women in Mexico. To this end, we adopt an ecological approach and analyze the role of a wide range of factors across four interrelated levels: Individual, relationship, community, and societal. We construct a multidimensional data set with 61,205 observations and 59 variables by integrating nationally representative data from the 2021 Mexican Survey on the Dynamics of Household Relationships with nine additional sources. For model estimation and factor selection, we combine model-based boosting with stability selection. Our findings reveal that women who were exposed to violence in childhood and whose partners were exposed to violence in childhood face a heightened risk of psychological IPV. These findings highlight the critical yet often overlooked role of childhood violence exposure for psychological IPV risk. Additionally, we confirm the role of three protective factors previously identified by Torres Munguía and Martínez-Zarzoso (2022) using 2016 data, now validated with 2021 data: women who had their first sex later in life and under consent, who have autonomy in decision-making regarding their professional life and use of economic resources, and who live in a household where housework is done only by male members face a lower risk of suffering psychological IPV.

Problem

• Analyzing psychological IPV against women in Mexico
• Identifying risk factors like childhood violence exposure
• Validating protective factors against psychological IPV

Innovation

• Machine learning analyzes psychological IPV factors
• Multidimensional dataset with 61,205 observations
• Model-based boosting with stability selection