The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

by Gary A. Haugen

To make it more concrete, one of the ways economists measure the costs of violence is by counting the aggregate years of productive life that violence takes away through disability. They call this measure the Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY). Now, try to fathom the fact that 9 million years of disability adjusted life years are lost each year worldwide as a result of rape and domestic violence against women.24 Now think about food production in Africa and the fact that women do almost all the work (80 percent). Imagine the impact on food production and on the tenuous economy of the poor as millions of Disability Adjusted Life Years are lost every year by women in Africa because of violence. Likewise, in India, a survey of women in Nagpur found that 13 percent of women had missed paid work because they were being beaten and abused in the home—that, on average, they had to miss a week and a half of work per incident.25 In Nicaragua, researchers found that women who were abused earned about half of what other women earned in wages.