Creating nurturing environments: Addressing domestic violence to improve early childhood development outcomes

This study asks whether laws that prohibit domestic violence improve how well young children develop. It uses data on 38,955 African children aged 36–59 months and compares children across places and times with different legal exposure. Children born after a domestic violence law was enacted were much more likely to be developmentally on track. Children who were only partly exposed to the law also did better. The gains came mostly from the socio-emotional domain of development.

Key points

• Over a quarter of young children across low- and middle-income countries face developmental delays.
• Domestic violence is harmful to children's healthy development.
• Domestic violence laws raised the probability of being developmentally on track by 27.7 percentage points for children born after enactment.
• Children with partial exposure to the laws showed a 24.1 percentage point increase.
• The gains were mainly driven by the socio-emotional domain.

Limitations

Only the abstract is available, so the countries studied, the data source, how the laws differ and the checks on the study assumptions are not described. The metadata hint of US does not match the document, which is about African children, so no country codes are given.