Background: In our eastern society, having children is a social responsibility for couples, thus, infertility is a significant life stressor that negatively impacts the couple's life. The relationship between both sexuality& violence and infertility is a topic of great significance. However, little research had opened that gate and there is paucity of published data about infertile female sexual dysfunction and partner violence against Egyptian females.
Objective: To evaluate the prevalence of domestic violence and sexual dysfunction among the infertile women and their fertile counterparts.
Subjects and methods: This study was a case-control study that was conducted 205 infertile cases and 205 fertile control counterparts. The Arabic validated version of NorVold Domestic Abuse Questionnaire (NORAQ) was used to assess four categories of abuse: emotional, physical, and sexual, violence. Moreover, Arabic translated version of Female Sexual Functioning Index (FSFI) that comprised six domains (desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction, and pain) was utilized to evaluate the female sexual dysfunction of the enrolled cases.
Results: Regarding NorVold Domestic Abuse Questionnaire (NORAQ) analysis, results showed that regarding the emotional violence, there was non-statistically significant difference between the percentage of cases who reported emotional violence the infertile cases (42.0%) and controls (40.5%). Regarding physical violence, 30.7% of the infertile cases in the current research reported that they had a physical violence compared to only 15.6% in the fertile controls (P<0.001). Regarding sexual violence it was the least represented in our work (21.5% and 14.6% in the infertile and fertile controls respectively) (P=0.07). As regard analysis of FSFI score, it was found that all its components; (Libido (desire), Sexual arousal, Lubrication, Orgasm, Satisfaction and Pain) were all significantly lower among infertile group (p<0.001) and also the total score was significantly lower among infertile group (p<0.001).Moreover, the univariate linear regression analysis reveals that BMI, frequency of emotional and physical violence were significant predictors for FSFI total score, while in the multivariate linear regression only frequency of physical violence was significant predictors for it.
Conclusion: Infertile women are more likely to be exposed to physical, sexual and psychological violence. Psychological violence was found to be the most common type of reported violence against infertile women followed by physical and sexual violence. Moreover the infertile women had a significantly higher prevalence of sexual dysfunctions than their fertile counterparts.