Exploring intimate partner violence among pregnant Eswatini women seeking antenatal care: How agency and food security impact violencerelated outcomes

摘要

Women with agency (i.e. the ability to make choices and act on them) mayexperience reduced food insecurity (FI) and intimate partner violence(IPV). Reducing FI and IPV among women are global goals; however,research focused on agency among Eswatini women has beenoverlooked, though they experience high rates of FI and IPV. Weanalysed cross-sectional data from 406 Swazi women who sought careat one rural and one urban–public antenatal clinic in 2013–2014 tounderstand how FI and agency, our independent variables, areassociated with IPV. We assessed the incidence rate ratio (IRR) ofnumber of violent events (including emotional, physical and sexual IPV)in the previous 12 months using Poisson regressions. We foundsignificant relationships between FI and IPV, where higher levels of FIwere associated with IPV risk (weekly: IRR = 2.18, 95 CI = 1.82–2.61;Daily: IRR = 3.53, 95 CI = 2.89–4.32) and constrained agency increasedwomen’s risk of IPV (IRR = 1.44; 95 CI = 1.22–1.70). Our findingssuggest that FI and agency independently impact women’s experience(s) of IPV. Interventions focused on women simultaneously experiencingsevere FI and constrained agency may have the highest impact;however, providing focused and moderate FI relief (e.g. reducing FIdaily to monthly) could potentially reduce women’s risk of experiencingviolence.