“Where a woman has somewhere else to turn, whom she marries loses much of its power to determine her fate.”

“Kinship may protect women best where nothing else will; but if we invest in supportive institutions and combat the cultural norms that limit women’s freedom, the protections cousin marriage offers will become unnecessary, and its constraints escapable.”

A result that is not necessarily expected: “Women married to first cousins report significantly lower rates of both physical intimate partner violence and coercive control than women in more distantly related or nonconsanguineous unions.” Via @olkcampbell.bsky.social

These results do not imply that cousin marriage is uniformly beneficial to women (in fact I also have a paper on a possible link between cousin marriage and honour-based violence), but they do suggest that that it is not all bad.

Could cousin-married women simply be less willing to disclose violence? As a partial check, I examine coercive control - such as husbands restricting contact with friends or insisting on knowing their wives’ whereabouts. Cousin-married women also report less control.

The association persists when comparing women living in the same neighbourhood or village and surveyed in the same year, helping to account for otherwise difficult to measure differences between communities - like the geographic patterning of poverty, services, or ethnic group.

Using data from Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Jordan (N ~ 36,000) I find that women married to first cousins are less likely to experience physical intimate partner violence than their non-cousin married counterparts - an 11% relative reduction.

But those same dense, overlapping family networks might also constrain women by prioritising family cohesion over individual autonomy, making it harder to challenge mistreatment or seek help.

There are reasons to predict it could go either way. It may protect women: marrying a cousin keeps women embedded within their own kin networks, potentially giving them greater support and making husbands more accountable to shared relatives who can intervene in disputes.