Does Knowledge Empower? Education, Legal Awareness, and Intimate Partner Violence

ABSTRACT This article exploits the rollout of the 1997 Basic Education Program in Turkey, a reform that extended compulsory school attendance, to estimate the causal effects of education on women’s awareness of laws designed to reduce gender inequality and prevent domestic violence. The study implements a regression-discontinuity design and finds that the additional years of schooling improved women’s legal awareness. Women exposed to the education reform were more likely to have heard about the new laws and services through newspapers, journals, or books. However, despite these improvements, the study finds no evidence of a significant change in the risk of women experiencing domestic violence or their ability to quit abusive relationships. HIGHLIGHTS Multiple barriers undermine women’s access to the justice system in Turkey. Education reform helped remove one such barrier: women’s legal awareness of their rights. However, legal awareness did not translate into significant changes in incidence of domestic violence. Raising awareness is a necessary first step but not enough to empower women to access to legal institutions.