On 15 March 2021, the World Health Organization held a webinar to present the newly published multiagency report by the Violence Against Women Inter-Agency Group, which contains prevalence estimates and data on violence against women in 2018. The research found that globally about 30% of women worldwide have been subjected to either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime. Most of this violence is intimate partner violence. Younger women are among those found to be most at risk.
Claudia García Moreno, who has been one of the leaders in WHO responsible for initiating, expanding and coordinating this work over several decades, presented some of the key findings. A panel of policy-makers from the UN and several countries also spoke, on how they will be using the data to highlight the importance of and need for strengthening country capacity to produce, collect, report and use these and other data to strengthen work against violence against women.
Below are four slides from the key findings, which give:
(1) a global picture of the prevalence of intimate partner violence in the past 12 months and lifetime prevalence,
(2) prevalence by age group,
(3) regional prevalence among women aged 15-49, and
(4) national prevalence estimates of lifetime intimate partner violence.
An important gap to date is that there are far less data available on violence against children than against women. Only 50 countries have data on girls and only about 10 countries have data on boys.
A summary of the findings of the new report can be found here. Summaries in languages other than English can be found here.
