A survey on prevalence of domestic violence against women and relationship with couple's characteristics

Domestic violence is one of common causes of physical injury and emotional trauma to women, in addition, It can influence on future generation health directly or indirectly and individuals with certain personal, familial and socio- economic characteristics may be at high risk. This survey designed to determine the prevalence of domestic violence against women and relationship with couple’s characteristics among women who came to family health clinics in Tehran (2007). This study is a descriptive cross sectional survey, 811 women were chosen with stratified random sampling sampling method. Data collection’s instrument was questionnaire that was filled out by interviewing. Descriptive and inferential statistics such as X2 and Fisher exact test were used for data analysis. The prevalence of domestic violence was 88.3% (95%CI, 86.1% -90.5%), physical abuse 25.4% (95%CI, 22.4%-28.3%), emotional abuse 87.3% (95%CI, 85.1%-89.5%) and sexual abuse 39.1% (95%CI, 35.8%-42.4%) was experienced by participants. significant association was seen among violence and a number of variables such as: woman’s marriage age [24 years old or less] (p<0.001), husband’s marriage age [younger than 30 years old] (p=0.023), husband’s education [high school graduate or less] (p=0.016), husband’s smoking (p=0.002), woman and husband’s psychological disorder (p=0.016), abortion history (p=0.012) and drug use by woman and husband (p=0.02) (p=0.004) respectively. With regard to high prevalence of domestic violence and it’s association with some of variables and since intervention can decrease violence and it’s adverse outcomes, women routine screening, in particular, high risk women about violence experience is recommended