Intimate-partner violence [letter]

Although Claudia Garcia-Moreno and colleagues acknowledge that intimate-partner violence is a global health-care problem they report that educational status does not explain differences in the prevalence of intimate-partner violence between the countries the research team visited. However other studies suggest conflicting results. Thompson and colleagues studied 3568 women aged 18–64 years in the USA and showed that the rates of intimatepartner violence were higher for women with less education. In another study Maziak reported that poor education was one important correlate of physical abuse in 412 Syrian women. The association between female educational status and intimate-partner violence is also documented in a review article by Jewkes. According to this study high educational status of women was associated with low levels of violence in some countries whereas in others the aforementioned relation followed an inverted U-shape pattern with low violence rates at the lowest and highest educational levels. (excerpt)