Right of Choice: Violence Against Women

16.10.2006
Right of Choice : Violence Against Women
FACTS & FIGURES


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. Violence against women and girls is a universal problem of epidemic proportions. Perhaps the most pervasive human rights violation that we know today, it devastates lives, fractures communities, and stalls development.

In a World Bank report, it was estimated that violence against women was as serious a cause of death and incapacity among women of reproductive age as cancer, and a greater cause of ill-health than traffic accidents and malaria combined. The economic cost is also considerable — a 2003 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that the costs of intimate partner violence in the USA alone exceed $5.8 billion per year: 4.1 billion are for direct medical and health care services while productivity losses account for nearly $1.8 billion.

Access to social services, protection, legal remedies, medical resources, places of refuge is limited despite the valiant efforts of numerous local NGOs to provide assistance. A climate of impunity further exacerbates the situation, ensuring that perpetrators go unpunished and free to continue their acts of violence. It is glaringly evident that much further effort is needed from governments and the international community to strengthen procedures and mechanisms to investigate, report, prosecute and remedy violence against women.