Work in progress

The Impact of Specialized Courts on Sexual Offences in South Africa
(with Daniela Horta Saenz & Mazeeda Karani) Sexual violence is a major human rights violation and public health concern, but the drivers of perpetration remain poorly understood. This paper examines how perpetration rates respond to increases in perceived enforcement as well as the salience of harm to victims. We leverage the staggered rollout of specialized sexual offenses courts (SOCs) in South Africa -- a policy innovation that aims to be survivor-centric while prioritizing the resolution of sex offenses. We find that SOCs reduce sexual offenses by 10%. These results are not explained by increased enforcement alone; effects are concentrated in areas with a higher density of civil society organizations providing victim support, while improvements in enforcement appear geographically uniform. We also observe lower tolerance for intimate partner violence in areas with longer exposure to SOCs, suggestive of a broader change in gender norms. Proxies for the nature of the violence, based on latent class analysis of data from specialized clinics, suggest that acquaintance rapes are most responsive to these changes, while violent offenses by strangers remain unchanged, as do offenses against children. Our results suggest that survivor support can amplify the preventive effects of enforcement by changing social understandings of harm to victims, while also highlighting heterogeneity in perpetration patterns.
Policing Intimate Partner Violence: Curbing Abuse or Shifting it? Policing is frequently posited to be an effective tool to deter perpetrators of intimate partner violence from repeating their abuse. However, abuse in intimate relationships often involves psychological violence and coercive control, which can be difficult to detect as compared to physical violence, but potentially just as harmful. Do criminal sanctions actually deter abusers? Or do perpetrators merely shift from using physical violence to more subtle forms of abuse like coercive control? I study this using granular incident-level police data from the United Kingdom. Results indicate that, on aggregate, charges reduce both physical violence and coercive control, driven largely by pairs of partners who do not file further complaints with the police. However, there is a shift from violence to coercive control among pairs that do return. The severity of the violence experienced, along with police officer characteristics, appear to be instrumental in this shift.
The Impact of Social Movements on Rape Rhetoric: Evidence from India
What is Truly Cultural? The Impact of Historical Information on Social Norms
Navigating Predictable Triggers: A Scalable Digital Intervention for Intimate Partner Violence
(with Daniela Horta Saenz)

Policy Writing

  • Oeindrila Dube, Smriti Ganapathi, Soeren J. Henn, and James A. Robinson. 2020.
    “Farmer-Herder Conflict in Nigeria’s Middle Belt: Evidence from 288 Communities.”
    Policy Report.