What one thinks, what one says and what one does: male justifications and practices of gender-based violence in Mali

Gender-based violence (GBV) is widespread across the world. While the majority of the literature focuses on women as the victims of GBV, this paper studies men’s justifications for and perpetration of GBV in Mali, one of the countries with the highest GBV prevalence rates in the world. We elicit the prevalence rates of eight GBV-related opinions and behaviors among a representative sample of 1,200 men in Bamako, the capital city. We administer a list experiment and a set of direct questions to estimate response bias. The list experiment prevalence rates show that a large portion of the male population justifies GBV: nearly one in two supports female genital mutilation and intimate partner violence, and one in four has physically hit an adult woman. Moreover, several questions show significant response biases when asked with the standard direct question technique. Support for female genital mutilation is overestimated, indicating that it is less common than generally thought. Conversely, justification for intimate partner violence is underestimated, likely due to increased societal pressure against it in Mali. These biases vary little with respondent characteristics, although men with a secondary education level support all forms of GBV analyzed in this study the least. Comparing our results with those from other contexts suggests that response bias could be shaped by the legal framework addressing GBV and that people’s perceptions of which dimensions are “socially acceptable” influence their own responses to standard direct questions, emphasizing the need to exercise caution with regard to the use of data collected via this survey technique.