BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND THE ECONOMIC COSTS OF CHILDREN’S EXPOSURE TO INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE
Abstract
Intimate partner violence comprises 37% of violent crime in Canada, imposing significant economic costs on society. Childhood exposure to intimate partner violence is a well-documented phenomenon, but the resulting costs are less understood. Some research has found that children exposed to intimate partner violence are at a greater risk of developing health and behavioural problems that potentially impact these children as well as society as a whole. However, there is no known estimate of the economic costs of this exposure to intimate partner violence. In this paper, we develop a simple model to estimate these costs. We estimate that each year there are approximately 125,000 new children exposed to intimate partner violence generating a yearly economic cost to society of $759 million for that one cohort of children in Canada. Over a period of 10 years, this one cohort would impose an economic cost of $7.0 billion, and this is substantially underestimated because it does not include the new sets of children exposed to intimate partner violence each year. As such, the potential for societal economic cost savings resulting from the prevention of intimate partner violence is significant.
Authors contributing to the International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported license. This licence allows anyone to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it for non-commercial purposes provided that appropriate attribution is given, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.
Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal right of first publication.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.