Pakistan has the highest rate of justifying wife-beating among its South Asian neighbors. Education is the sharpest dividing line by far.

Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics team Pulled DHS microdata from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh to look at both attitudes toward domestic violence and actual reported experience of it.

Attitudes — justifying wife-beating for at least one reason: → Pakistan: 41.6% → India: 38.3% → Bangladesh: 13.8%

Pakistan comes out worst of the three — nearly 3x Bangladesh’s rate.

But actual reported experience tells a different story: → India: 28.6% →
Pakistan: 23.0% → Bangladesh: not measured (the DV experience module wasn’t run in their 2022 survey round)

Pakistan’s stated attitudes are the most permissive of the three countries, but its reported violence rate is actually lower than India’s. That gap between what people say is acceptable and what they report having actually experienced is worth sitting with — it could reflect real differences in behavior, or it could reflect underreporting, different question framing, or social desirability effects in how women answer. I wouldn’t over-read it either way without more digging.

The one number that cuts through all of this cleanly: education.

In Pakistan, wife-beating justification drops from 45.4% among less-educated women to 16.2% among women with 12+ years of education — a difference of nearly 3x, the single sharpest divide of anything we’ve looked at in this whole education series. The same pattern holds for actual violence experience: 25.1% versus 10.1%.