Impact of Peru's women's emergency centres on the reporting of physical, psychological and sexual intimate partner violence

Background Violence against women is a global problem with serious consequences. In response, Peru established women's emergency centres or Centros de Emergencia Mujer (CEMs) in 1999, offering support services like psychological and legal counselling for women suffering from violence. CEMs also implemented preventive activities such as educational programmes and community outreach to prevent domestic violence. This study aimed to assess the impact of CEMs on physical, psychological and sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) in Peru. Methods We conducted a secondary analysis of the Peru Demographic and Health Surveys' domestic violence module, from 2004, the first year of available data, to 2016. We use a difference-in-differences approach with the Callaway and Sant'Anna estimator to account for the staggered introduction of CEMs across districts. Results Our findings showed that CEMs lead to an average increase of 3.00 percentage points (pp) (95% CI: 0.61 to 5.39) in the probability of reporting any form of physical, psychological or sexual IPV, primarily driven by psychological violence reporting (3.07 pp, 95 %CI: 0.60 to 5.55). Analyses of the effect of CEMs on physical and sexual violence were inconclusive but indicate that the CEMs did not have large impacts on these forms of violence. Discussion CEMs may have increased the reporting mainly of psychological IPV to the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). This increase in psychological IPV could be due to heightened sensitisation, leading to more individuals reporting to the DHS than before, or to a rise in incidence stemming from unaddressed root causes of violence or potential backlash effects. Our results are inconclusive regarding the impact of CEMs in IPV incidence and highlight the need to refine CEM preventive services and adopt comprehensive strategies to combat and to measure the impact of interventions in IPV. Further research is essential to understand the complexities of IPV prevention and measurement to continuously monitor the progress of such interventions.