Essays on Violence, Health and Family Dynamics

Abstract

[eng] Violence is a pervasive societal challenge with profound economic implications. The experience of violence can have durable impacts on the life-outcomes of victims: their health; labor market opportunities, educational attainment - but also on their descendants and their peers, thereby contributing to the transmission of inequality and large costs for society. Violence's toll goes beyond its immediate, negative effects on victims. Episodes of collective violence (wars, conflicts, colonization) can also have durable effects on long-run development and societies. The experience of violence is, in addition, not random. Economically, socially and politically disadvantaged communities are much more likely to experience violence, whether it be collective - through political repression, wars, labor coercion... - or inter-personal (e.g gender-based violence or racial violence). The experience of violence is, therefore, highly intertwined with the transmission of inequality. The general goal of my thesis is to contribute to a better understanding of the causes and consequences of violence against minorities, with a particular focus on the expression of violence in the familiar setting. I use both historical and contemporary data and adopt a multifaceted approach: both in terms of the events of violence studied (institutional or interpersonal), the targeted minority (racial or gender), and the context (historical or contemporary). The first section focuses on the lingering effects of institutional violence in a historical setting: New World Slavery. I focus on the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, and study the determinants of violence during Slavery (Chapter 2) and its lingering effects on the immediate descendants of former slaves (Chapter 3). The work presented in this section is the fruit of a large scale digitization effort of handwritten administrative archives (nearly 50,000 pages) on enslaved individuals and their descendants. To collect this new data, I built an optical character recognition pipeline tailored for French Handwritten Archives, which I present in Chapter 4. Given the persistent effects of violence, investigating the efficiency of current policies in identifying and protecting victims of violence is of primary importance. The second section turns a contemporary context, and focuses on state's responses to systemic violence against women and children during the COVID-19 pandemic (Chapter 5). Both sections focus on two potential drivers of violence in the familiar setting: intergenerational transmission of trauma, and exogenous stressful shocks. These two sections are also complementary in their approach to the problem of violence. While the first section focuses on the mechanisms through which violence has lingering effects, the second section focuses on the efficiency of institutional responses to intra-familial abuse. The health dimension is also highly present in all chapters: either as consequence of violence, using mortality as outcome of interest in Chapter 2 and 3; or as a cause of violence - the COVID-19 health shock - and institution of interest (the health sector) in Chapter 5.