Violence against women
Violence against women, also known as gender-based violence, violence against women and girls, or sexual and gender-based violence, is violence primarily committed by men or boys against women or girls. Such violence is often considered hate crime, committed against persons specifically because they are of the female gender, and can take many forms. Violence against men is the corresponding category, where acts of violence are targeted against the male gender.
VAW has an extensive history, though the incidents and intensity of violence has varied over time and between societies. Such violence is often seen as a mechanism for the subjugation of women, whether in society in general or in an interpersonal relationship.
The UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women states, "violence against women is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women" and "violence against women is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men."
Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, declared in a 2006 report posted on the United Nations Development Fund for Women website:
Violence against women and girls is a problem of pandemic proportions. At least one out of every three women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime with the abuser usually someone known to her.
Definition
International instruments aiming to eliminate violence against women and domestic violence have been enacted by various international bodies. These generally start with a definition of gendered violence, and a proposal to combat it. The Istanbul Convention of the Council of Europe describes VAW as "a violation of human rights and a form of discrimination against women" and defines VAW as "all acts of gender-based violence that result in or are likely to result in physical, sexual, psychological, or economic harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life".The 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women of the United Nations General Assembly makes recommendations relating to VAW, and the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action mentions VAW. However, the 1993 United Nations General Assembly resolution on the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women was the first international instrument to explicitly define VAW and elaborate on the subject. Other definitions of VAW are set out in the 1994 Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence Against Women and by the 2003 Maputo Protocol.
In addition, the term gender-based violence refers to "any acts or threats of acts intended to hurt or make women suffer physically, sexually, or psychologically, and which affect women because they are women or affect women disproportionately". Gender-based violence is often used interchangeably with violence against women, and some articles on VAW reiterate these conceptions by stating that men are the main perpetrators of this violence. Moreover, the definition stated by the 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women also supported the notion that violence is rooted in the inequality between men and women when the term violence is used together with the term gender-based.
In Recommendation Rec5 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on the protection of women against violence, the Council of Europe stipulated that VAW "includes, but is not limited to, the following":
These definitions of VAW as gender-based are seen by some to be unsatisfactory. These definitions understand society as patriarchal, signifying unequal relations between men and women. Opponents of such definitions argue that the definitions disregard violence against men and that the term gender, as used in gender-based violence, only refers to women. Other critics argue that employing the term gender in this particular way introduces notions of inferiority and subordination for femininity and superiority for masculinity. There is no widely accepted current definition that covers all the dimensions of gender-based violence.
| Document | Adopted by | Date | Definition |
| General Recommendation 19 | CEDAW Committee | 1992 | 'The definition of discrimination includes gender-based violence, that is, violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately.' |
| DEVAW | United Nations | 20 December 1993 | '...the term "violence against women" means any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women'. |
| Belém do Pará Convention | Organization of American States | 9 June 1994 | '...violence against women shall be understood as any act or conduct, based on gender, which causes death or physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, whether in the public or the private sphere.' |
| Maputo Protocol | African Union | 11 July 2003 | '"Violence against women" means all acts perpetrated against women which cause or could cause them physical, sexual, psychological, and economic harm, including the threat to take such acts; or to undertake the imposition of arbitrary restrictions on or deprivation of fundamental freedoms in private or public life in peace time and during situations of armed conflicts or of war...' |
| Istanbul Convention | Council of Europe | 11 May 2011 | '..."violence against women" is understood as a violation of human rights and a form of discrimination against women and shall mean all acts of gender-based violence that result in, or are likely to result in, physical, sexual, psychological or economic harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life;... "gender" shall mean the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men; "gender-based violence against women" shall mean violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately...'. The preamble notes: '...Recognising that women and girls are exposed to a higher risk of gender-based violence than men; Recognising that domestic violence affects women disproportionately, and that men may also be victims of domestic violence...' |
Forms of violence
Violence against women fits into several broad categories. These include violence carried out by individuals and states.Some forms of violence by individual perpetrators are: rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, acid throwing, reproductive coercion, female infanticide, prenatal sex selection, obstetric violence, online gender-based violence and mob violence; as well as harmful customary or traditional practices such as honor killings, dowry violence, female genital mutilation, marriage by abduction and forced marriage.
Forms of violence may be perpetrated or condoned by governments, such as war rape; sexual violence and sexual slavery during conflict, forced sterilization; forced abortion; violence by police and authoritative personnel; stoning and flogging.
Many forms of VAW, such as trafficking in women and forced prostitution are often perpetrated by organized criminal networks. Historically, there have been forms of organized WAV, such as Witch trials in the early modern period or the sexual slavery of comfort women.
The Gender Equality Commission of the Council of Europe identifies nine forms of violence against women based on subject and context rather than life cycle or time period:
- 'Violence within the family or domestic violence'
- 'Rape and sexual violence'
- 'Sexual harassment'
- 'Violence in institutional environments'
- 'Female genital mutilation'
- 'Forced marriages'
- 'Violence in conflict and post-conflict situations'
- 'Killings in the name of honour'
- 'Failure to respect freedom of choice with regard to reproduction'
By age groups
| Phase | Type of violence |
| Pre-birth | Sex-selective abortion; effects of battering during pregnancy on birth outcomes |
| Infancy | Female infanticide; physical, sexual and psychological abuse |
| Girlhood | Child marriage; female genital mutilation; physical, sexual and psychological abuse; incest; child prostitution and pornography |
| Adolescence and adulthood | Dating and courtship violence ; economically coerced sex ; incest; sexual abuse in the workplace; rape; sexual harassment; forced prostitution and pornography; trafficking in women; partner violence; marital rape; dowry abuse and murders; partner homicide; psychological abuse; abuse of women with disabilities; forced pregnancy |
| Elderly | Forced "suicide" or homicide of widows for economic reasons; sexual, physical and psychological abuse |
Sexual violence
involves actions with unwelcome sexual overtones, including verbal transgressions. Sexual violence is a broader term referring to violence to obtain a sexual act, for example, trafficking. Sexual assault is usually defined as unwanted sexual contact and when this involves sexual penetration or sexual intercourse it is referred to as rape.Women are most often the victims of rape, usually perpetrated by men known to them. The rates of reporting, prosecution, and convictions for rape vary considerably in different jurisdictions and are influenced by the society's attitudes toward such crimes. It is considered the most underreported violent crime. Following a rape, a victim may face violence or threats from the rapist and, in many cultures, from the victim's own family and relatives. Violence or intimidation of the victim may be perpetrated by the rapist, or by friends and relatives of the rapist, as a way of preventing the victims from reporting the rape, punishing them for reporting it, or forcing them to withdraw the complaint; or it may be perpetrated by the relatives of the victim as a punishment for "bringing shame" to the family. Internationally, the incidence of rapes recorded by police during 2008 varied between 0.1 per 100,000 people in Egypt and 91.6 per 100,000 people in Lesotho with 4.9 per 100,000 people in Lithuania as the median. Around the world, rape is often not reported or handled properly by law enforcement for a wide variety of reasons.
In 2011, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that "nearly 20% of all women" in the United States suffered attempted rape or rape sometime in their lives. More than a third of the victims were raped before the age of 18.