Pooled analysis of the association between mental health and violence against women: evidence from five settings in the Global South

The Angry Echo Chamber: A Study of Extremist and Emotional Language Changes in Incel Communities Over Time

Involuntary celibates, or incels, are part of a growing online subculture. Incels are men who are unable to engage in a sexual relationship with a woman and who experience significant distress and anger as a result. In recent years, high-profile incidents of violence perpetrated by incels or those who share incel ideology have increased research attention. Incels communicate online and share several characteristics with other online extremist groups. While only a fraction of incels engage in such violence, a broader spectrum of violence should be considered, including online harassment or general violence against women. This study sought to examine how ongoing engagement on an online incel forum affects changes in incel comments in terms of expressed anger and sadness and use of incel violent extremist language. We collected comments made on an incel forum over a 3-month period. We then identified prolific users and included their comments in our analysis. To assess how their language changed, we used a text-processing program (LIWC: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to assess the extent to which anger, sadness, and incel violent extremist language were expressed in the comments. Our findings indicated that incels express more anger in their comments than users on other platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. However, they did not express greater sadness. Further, we found that incels are already quite angry and sad when they join the forum, and they already use a fair amount of incel vocabulary. Initially, these aspects of their language increase, but they flatten over time. This pattern suggests that introduction to and embracing of incel ideology occurs elsewhere on the Internet, and prior to people joining an incel forum. Implications in terms of prevention of online radicalization and future directions are discussed.

Pooled analysis of the association between food insecurity and violence against women: Evidence from low- and middle-income settings

Background

Intimate partner violence impacts relationships across the socioeconomic spectrum, nonetheless its prevalence is reported to be highest in areas that are most socio-economically deprived. Poverty has direct and indirect impacts on intimate partner violence (IPV) risk, however, one of the postulated pathways is through food insecurity. The aim of this paper is to describe the association between food insecurity (household hunger) and women's experiences, and men's perpetration, of intimate partner violence and non-partner sexual violence in data from Africa and Asia.

Methods

We conducted a pooled analysis of data from baseline interviews with men and women participating in six Violence Against Women prevention intervention evaluations and present a meta-analysis using mixed-effects Poisson regression models. Data were from South Africa (two studies), Ghana, Rwanda (two data sets), and Afghanistan and comprised interviews with 6545 adult women and 8104 adult men. We assessed food insecurity with the Household Hunger Scale.

Results

Overall, 27.9% of women experienced moderate food insecurity (range from 11.1% to 44.4%), while 28.8% of women reported severe food insecurity (range from 7.1 to 54.7%). Overall food insecurity was associated with an increased likelihood of women experiencing physical intimate partner violence, adjusted incidence rate ratio (aIRR) = 1.40 (95% CI = 1.23 to 1.60) for moderate food insecurity and aIRR = 1.73 (95% CI = 1.41 to 2.12) for severe food insecurity. It was also associated with an increased likelihood of men reporting perpetration of physical IPV, with aIRR = 1.24 (95% CI = 1.11 to 1.39) for moderate food insecurity and aIRR = 1.18 (95% CI = 1.02 to 1.37) for severe food insecurity. Food insecurity was not significantly associated with women's experience of non-partner sexual violence, aIRR = 1.27 (95% CI = 0.93 to 1.74) for moderate or severe food insecurity vs none, nor men's perpetration of non-partner sexual violence aIRR = 1.02 (95% CI = 0.90 to 1.15).

Conclusions

Food insecurity is associated with increased physical intimate partner violence perpetration and experience reported by men and women. It was not associated with non-partner sexual violence perpetration, although there was some evidence to suggest an elevated risk of non-partner sexual violence among food-insecure women. Prevention programming needs to embrace food insecurity as a driver of intimate partner violence perpetration, however, non-partner sexual violence prevention needs to be shaped around a separate understanding of its drivers.