Violence against women, girls – an endemic problem

International Women’s Day 2025 celebrates 30 years of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, agreed by 189 governments in 1995. In the secretary general’s review of 159 countries, he found significant gains for women, especially in health and education, but finds: “gender discrimination remains deeply embedded in all economies and societies”. This is significant as feminists have long argued that inequality is a key factor in Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG).

Despite over 40 years and £40 billion spent by the United Nations, VAWG remains one of the most pervasive and endemic problems facing the world today. When the UN started collecting data, they found that one in three women and girls were likely to face abuse at some point in their lives. These figures continue to increase.

Every day in 2017, one hundred and thirty-seven women were killed, and worldwide figures show that some 736 million experienced violence. The UN figures for 2023 show that “on average, 140 women and girls worldwide lost their lives every day at the hands of their partner or a close relative”. Of the 85,000 women and girls killed in 2023, fifty-one thousand were killed by their intimate partner or family member.

Dr Claudia Garcia-Moreno, the WHO’s lead on violence against women, said the 2021 figures of one in three women aged 15-49 years experiencing some form of sexual or physical violence in their lifetime should be a “wake-up call” to governments. She called for better training of professionals, a reduction in the stigma attached to intimate partner violence, and the dismantling of gender inequality: “Starting by making schools safe places because in many countries and settings, unfortunately, they are not.”

She further called for comprehensive sex education and lessons on how to build healthy relationships and the treating of violence against women as a societal problem, with boys and men involved in tackling it. Not solving this problem has consequences as the Home Office recognises: “It is high volume: affecting 2.4 million adults every year. It is high harm. One in five homicides is a domestic homicide. And it is high cost. The social and economic costs of domestic abuse are estimated to be in the region of £78 billion (2022 to 2023 prices) over a three-year average period of abuse.”

UNSPOKEN EPIDEMIC

Speaking at meetings on intimate partner violence, I was sometimes asked, “… Are black men more violent?” A legitimate question in my opinion as black men perpetrate higher-than-average levels of violence worldwide, with Oceania, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas topping the regional lists for countries with the highest murder rates. Caribbean and Latin American countries account for nearly 50 per cent of the world’s intentional homicide victims despite representing just eight per cent of the global population.

According to UN data, Central America stands out as the most violent subregion, with Central America and the Caribbean experiencing annual increases in homicide rates of about four per cent in the last two decades - twice as high as for sub–Saharan Africa.

Black women experience higher levels of intimate partner violence wherever they find themselves in the world. Black is used here as a political term to be inclusive of all non-white people. Every day in the USA in 2020, five black women and girls were killed, most of them with guns. The level of killing of black women equalled the homicide rates for black men for the first time in what was reported as “an unspoken epidemic” for black women and girls.

I reply to my questioner that there is nothing in black men that makes them more violent. Rather, the legacy of colonialism and brutal enslavement has left many men with deep patterns of violent behaviour.

NEEDS POLITICAL ACTION

Despite awareness of the social and economic costs, solutions to the problem remain elusive with “the total number of domestic abuse-related crimes recorded by the police has soared by 116 per cent, from 421,185 in 2015 to 16 to 910,980 in 2021 to 22”. Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, said: “When you look (at) violence against women and children, there are millions of offenders in the UK … The scale of this is way beyond policing and the justice system, and we need a frank conversation about it.”

This is sobering, coming from the most senior police officer, who described the figures as “eye watering” and called for more money to tackle the problem, a national strategy, and more importantly, a bigger effort. The new Labour government promised to halve the figures, which now stand at two million, in 10 years, but plans for ‘tougher sanctions’ for perpetrators and proposed increased arms spending may make the situation worse for women and girls.

Violence against women is political, and it needs political action to end it. The first archaic states legalised violence against women. That was a political decision some 4,000 years ago that continues to affect the lives of women and girls today. Although most governments now have laws against Intimate Partner Violence, the problem persists.

In her book Feminist Theory-From Margin to Centre, Bell Hooks argues that there can be no ending of VAWG without ending all violence - including state violence. Ending violence against children, preventing socialisation for violence, and unlearning sexism are three steps to ending VAWG that individuals can take to make a difference.

Luke Daniels is president of Caribbean Labour Solidarity which promotes equality, democracy, justice and social progress in the Caribbean. He is also author of the book ‘Pulling the Punches, Defeating Domestic Violence’.