Most women know their attackers. 35% of women worldwide have experienced violence and, according to a new report from the World Health Organisation (WHO), that figure only falls to 30% when they studied violence against women that was by intimate partners.

This is the first time that WHO have gathered this worldwide data by pulling together dozens of national and regional studies. Here, we look at which women are most likely to be experience violence and how their health is affected as a result.

Regional differences

Though violence against women is undoubtedly a universal problem, the WHO research suggests that there are regional patterns in its prevalence. It finds that women in Africa are almost twice as likely to experience violence than women in Europe – a particularly striking finding given that ‘women’ are defined in the study as females aged 15 and over.

However, the term ‘Europe’ may be slightly misleading here. Only Europe’s low and middle-income countries are included (from Albania to Ukraine) while countries like the UK and France are grouped together with those from other regions in the ‘High Income’ category.

Types of violence

Violence by an intimate partner and violence by someone other than a woman’s partner are both considered in this report – although the two differ hugely in their prevalence.

The fact that 38% of all murders of women worldwide are committed by intimate partners stands out as one of the most startling figures in the entire report..
 

Most violence against women worldwide, whether sexual or not, is committed by their intimate partners. In South-East Asia for example, women are almost eight times more likely to experience violence by a current or former partner than someone else. Looking at the ratio between partner and non-partner violence makes these trends more explicit.
 

Health consequences

The report catalogues the disastrous consequences that violence has on women’s physical, mental and sexual and reproductive health. Many of these are complex and not immediately evident, but their impact is often enormous.

Non-fatal injuries are one of the most direct effects of violence. The report uses the USA as an example where half of women in abusive relationships are physically injured by their partners and that most of them sustain multiple types of injuries – the head, neck and face being the most common, followed by muscular, skeletal and genital injuries.

Several studies identified that women with a history of intimate partner violence are 16% more likely to have a low-birth-weight baby and twice as likely to report having had an induced abortion – nearly half of which globally take place in unsafe conditions. What’s more, when compared with women who have not experienced partner violence, those that have are 1.5 times more likely to acquire HIV.

Every study that looked at the relationship between intimate partner violence and harmful alcohol use found a positive correlation between the two – although substance abuse may also be linked mental health disorders which also increase a woman’s vulnerability to violence.

Depression and suicide was also consistently cited as a severe health consequence of violence against women. Traumatic stress is the mechanism most likely to explain the fact that depression rates are double for women who have experienced violence.

Conflict and violence against women

Several studies have explored how violence against women rises in times of conflict. In March this year Maplecroft, a risk analytics company, analysed the risk of sexual violence in conflict across 15 years using indicators such as the “systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war”.

Click to view full map. Source: Maplecroft 2013 

Their findings may shed light on some of the regional trends in violence against women. Of the ten countries where the risk of sexual violence in conflict was highest, seven were in Africa.

The problem has also been recognised by the UN who have a specificcampaign called Stop Rape Now aimed at ending sexual violence in conflict.

Today’s report sheds light on not only how widespread violence against women is – but also the deep effect it has on their health. By highlighting the connection between violence and health, WHO has marked the first step in a public health response.