DEFINING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
Violence against women is a multifaceted global issue. In it’s Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, adopted in 1993, the United Nations General Assembly defined violence against women as ‘any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life’.
Clearly, this definition is quite broad; violence by this definition can include female genital mutilation, human and sex trafficking, child marriage, sexual assault, domestic violence, harassment, and more. For our research purposes, we have chosen to focus on how specific local and global organizations tackle the issue of violence against women in terms of research and preventative programming. Due to the broad nature of this issue, our research will look at several of the aforementioned kinds of violence.
WHY THIS MATTERS: A LOOK AT THE STATISTICS
According to the World Health Organization, 1 in 3 (35%) women globally have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime.
A great majority of this violence is intimate partner violence. Globally, nearly one third (30%) of women who have been in a relationship report that they have experienced some form of physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner. 38% of women who are murdered worldwide are killed by a male intimate partner.
The United Nations reports that “In the majority of countries with available data, less than 40 per cent of the women who experience violence seek help of any sort.” This is why activist organizations are incredibly important in helping to solve this issue. Programming aimed at educating communities at large about the causes of violence (attitudes, prior exposure, etc) as well as the resources available to victims can help reduce incidences of violence and increase the number of women who seek help.
OUR GOALS
Our group has chosen to look at how Promundo, Women’s Learning Partnership, and Madre, tackle these issues both locally and globally. By analyzing the techniques of activism utilized by these organizations, we hope to see which strategies are most effective in their respective geographic and content areas. As previously stated, violence against women is an incredibly broad issue; we maintain that none of our findings are fully comprehensive.