Divorce as Liberation from Violence: The Role of Legal Protection and Women’s Shelters

Abstract

Does increased legal infrastructure empower victims to leave abusive relationships? Structural barriers often prevent victims of intimate partner violence from seeking help, with two-thirds of female victims in Europe neither reporting incidents nor accessing support. I study Germany’s 2002 Act on Protection against Violence, which introduced residence bans in shared households and temporarily awarded victims sole use of the dwelling, summarized as “the aggressor goes, the victim stays”. Using divorce records (1998–2005), linked on the county-level to a hand-collected database of women’s shelter and counselling center openings (1970–2023), I estimate how divorce numbers changed in the period after the reform relative to the period before. I show that divorces rise markedly in the three years following the reform and decrease in the fourth. Trends are driven by female-initiated filings and are concentrated in West Germany, with increases appearing more persistent among non-German filers over time. To assess whether effects vary with support availability, I classify counties by pre-reform infrastructure of women’s shelters and counselling centers. Changes are muted where services already existed and strongest in areas lacking support infrastructure at the time of the legal change. These patterns are consistent with a two-stage model in which pre-existing support had already led abusive marriages to dissolve and/or deterred their formation, leaving a smaller stock of detectable abusive unions.