Domestic violence in Russia: shocks or historical legacies?

This talk explores the contemporaneous and historical factors of domestic violence using Covid-19 pandemic as a shock. As a primary source of data, the authors use a geocoded online survey of about 23,000 respondents conducted in November 2020 in 61 Russian regions and supplement it with the data from the 1897 Census of the Russian Empire. They find that economic hardships and mental health problems during the pandemic are positively associated with the prevalence of domestic violence, measured by domestic violence awareness of both women and men and self-reported domestic violence experience among women. In addition, they observe a similar pattern for the perceived increase in domestic violence since the beginning of the pandemic, reported by women and men. The authors further confirm their findings by using Google trends search index as an alternative measure of domestic violence.