Recent Changes in Men‘s Attitudes Toward Wife-Beating: The Roles of Global Script Dissemination, Exposure and Local Resistance in Northern and Southern Nigeria

Intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) is a global social pandemic with several adverse effects on the health and well-being of its victims. Given that IPVAW is fueled by traditional gender norms that recommend, endorse and sustain it, several international development projects have been centered on seeking attitudinal transitions in people everywhere, to shift them from normative acceptance of IPVAW to its rejection. Nigeria is one of those countries with heavy international and national investments. However, studies examining the effects of these activities are clearly absent in the current literature. Meanwhile, the World Society theory and the Exposure theory orient us to expect consistent decline in wife-beating acceptance as a result of the global campaigns but paid little to no attention to potential resistance from hegemonic patriarchal local forces. In this study, the author borrowed three rounds of nationally representative survey data collected over the space of ten years (2008 to 2018) in Nigeria and comparatively investigated trends, patterns, and predictors of changes in men‘s (N = 25,276) wife-beating attitudes in the Shariah-compliant Northern and the Western-styled Southern Nigerian regions. As predicted by the World Society theorists, Nigerian men became increasingly less likely to justify wife-beating, from 32% in 2008 to 19% in 2018, but the pace of decline was slower in the Shariah-compliant north. The large north-south development discrepancy was mostly due to improvements in exposure and empowerment mechanisms in the South and civil conflicts by revolutionists in the North. More findings and their theoretical-cum-policy implications are discussed.