Intimate partner violence: A novel warning system in which the victims' environment alerts to the danger

Abstract

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) has become a problem of a great magnitude as it is a leading cause of death for women according to the World Health Organization. This paper presents a novel Early Warning System (EWS) for locating and protecting potential victims of IPV in which the victims’ environment plays a central role. Specifically, based on Markov random fields, our EWS measures the danger through the perception that the victims’ surroundings have. This new standpoint is of particular relevance since most of the IPV victims do not have a clear perception of the approaching danger. The EWS has been designed without geographical constrains to be appropriate for use in every country of the world (universal EWS). Importantly, it may be rewritten into computational terms thereby providing a real tool for police investigations. Connections with text mining and sentiment analysis may provide additional devices based on this model.