Secret societies and gender-based violence against women in sub-Saharan Africa

Secret societies – associations whose members possess knowledge prohibited to non-members –are widespread institutions across pre-colonial and contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. Motivated by ethnographic and anthropological accounts describing their role in the subjugation of women and the facilitation of violence against them, I test two hypotheses: that women belonging to ethnic groups with secret societies experience greater levels of violence overall, and that they experience greater male backlash when seeking greater autonomy. Through the construction of a new ethnicity-level dataset reporting the presence of secret societies across sub-Saharan Africa, and using a number of strategies – including ordinary least squares regressions, a spatial regression discontinuity design, and the analysis of a randomized controlled trial – I find evidence consistent with both hypotheses. These results provide new empirical evidence that traditional and cultural institutions are an important yet understudied factor with respect to understanding the causes of violence against women.