This textbook provides students across Social Sciences, Humanities, Politics, and International Studies with an in-depth understanding of the issues, policies, and strategies for addressing the symptoms and root causes of violence against women (VAW) in sub-Saharan Africa. This text uses the United Nations Security Council’s Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) on Women, Peace and Security in Eastern and Southern Africa as a framework to present the causes and impacts of VAW and to trace the journey of sub-Saharan African countries toward gender equality. It also provides an overview of the policy and legislative frameworks that underpin the progress, challenges, and achievements of addressing VAW based on four key pillars: prevention, protection, participation, and relief and recovery. Chapters provide a wealth of knowledge, as the book draws on academic literature; national, regional, and international legislations; and data collected from field research, and makes use of end-of-chapter discussion questions and quick study guides. Students will come away equipped with the tools, resources, and knowledge necessary to address and fix VAW in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.

Violence against women is one factor in the growing wave of alarm about violence in American society. High-profile cases such as the O.J. Simpson trial call attention to the thousands of lesser-known but no less tragic situations in which women's lives are shattered by beatings or sexual assault. The search for solutions has highlighted not only what we know about violence against women but also what we do not know. How can we achieve the best understanding of this problem and its complex ramifications? What research efforts will yield the greatest benefit? What are the questions that must be answered? Understanding Violence Against Women presents a comprehensive overview of current knowledge and identifies four areas with the greatest potential return from a research investment by increasing the understanding of and responding to domestic violence and rape: What interventions are designed to do, whom they are reaching, and how to reach the many victims who do not seek help. Factors that put people at risk of violence and that precipitate violence, including characteristics of offenders. The scope of domestic violence and sexual assault in America and its conequences to individuals, families, and society, including costs. How to structure the study of violence against women to yield more useful knowledge. Despite the news coverage and talk shows, the real fundamental nature of violence against women remains unexplored and often misunderstood. Understanding Violence Against Women provides direction for increasing knowledge that can help ameliorate this national problem.

This book offers new perspectives on gender-based violence in three regions where the subject has been taboo in everyday discourse often due to patriarchal cultural norms that limit women’s autonomy. The contributions to this book provide rare insight into not only the levels and the socio-demographic determinants of domestic violence, but topics ranging from men’s attitudes toward wife beating; domestic violence-related adolescent deaths, and women’s health problems due to sexual and physical abuse. With a comprehensive introduction that provides a comparative international research framework for discussing gender-based violence in these three unique regions, this volume provides a key basis for understanding gender-based violence on a more global level. Part I, on Africa, covers men’s attitudes towards domestic violence, the impact of poverty and fertility, the association between adolescent deaths and domestic violence, and the link between domestic abuse and HIV. Part II, on the Middle East, covers the importance of consanguinity on domestic violence in Egypt and Jordan, the effects of physical abuse on reproductive health, and the link between political unrests and women’s experience and attitudes towards domestic violence. Part III, on India, shows how sexual abuse puts women at risk of reproductive tract infections and sexually transmitted infections, as well as the role of gender norms in wife abuse and the role of youth aggressive behavior in nonconsensual sex. With such a deep and broad coverage of factors of intimate partner abuse, this book serves as a reference document for researchers, decision-makers, and organizations that are searching for ways to reduce gender-based domestic violence. This book is of interest for researchers in Criminology and Criminal Justice, as well as Sociology, Social Work, Public Health and Human Rights.

This book examines violence against women in Africa and criminal justice from the perspective of African scholars, practitioners and experts. As a global and long-standing issue, violence against women is gaining public visibility across the African continent with some states announcing a national crisis warranting immediate redress. At the global level, the elimination of all forms of violence against all women and girls forms a key part of United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5: Gender Equality. Split across two volumes, these books present a comprehensive analysis of the latest research and theories, principles and practices of criminal justice systems, criminal justice accountability mechanisms, and the key challenges women face in their quest for justice on the African continent. This volume (II) focusses on sexual violence and vulnerable women’s access to justice in Africa. Volume I focusses on legislation and its impact, the limitations of criminal justice responses, and the cultural and social norms regarding access to justice. Together, they adopt a comparative approach that highlight gaps and good practices to provide a rich source of authoritative information for promoting an intra-African dialogue and cross-fertilization of ideas across the different criminal justice traditions in Africa. Both volumes seek to advance discussions on eliminating violence against women in Africa and speak to those interested in criminal justice, violence, gender studies and African legal studies.

Eliminating violence against women globally is now seen as one of the major challenges of the twenty-first century. This book introduces a wide readership to the problem of violence against women and girls (VAWG) identified by social movements, researchers, and policymakers. It provides raw material, stories from around the world, macro data, and up-to-date knowledge on the various forms of VAWG. It highlights the intersections of VAWG with several other issues, andsets out the most promising policy and advocacy frameworks to end this violence.

Africa as a continent, which holds strong to its patriarchal cultural principles and practices, is known for its blatant display of violent abuse of women, including state-sanctioned violence, and its lax approach to national legislative policies and international treaties against violence against women. Using data from Africa, the Americas, Australia, and Europe, this edited collection showcases a variety of experiences and perspectives in the international comparative study of violence against women of African ancestry. This approach provides the context for examining the problem of violence against women, including its policy and practice responses (if any), as it impacts women of African origin in different parts of the world. This book is of value to those interested in African studies, criminology, gender studies, sociology, and many more.

Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa reveals the ways in which domestic space and domestic relationships take on different meanings in African contexts that extend the boundaries of family obligation, kinship, and dependency. The term domestic violence encompasses kin-based violence, marriage-based violence, gender-based violence, as well as violence between patrons and clients who shared the same domestic space. As a lived experience and as a social and historical unit of analysis, domestic violence in colonial and postcolonial Africa is complex. Using evidence drawn from Sub-saharan Africa, the chapters explore the range of domestic violence in Africa’s colonial past and its present, including taxation and the insertion of the household into the broader structure of colonial domination. African histories of domestic violence demand that scholars and activists refine the terms and analyses and pay attention to the historical legacies of contemporary problems. This collection brings into conversation historical, anthropological, legal, and activist perspectives on domestic violence in Africa and fosters a deeper understanding of the problem of domestic violence, the limits of international human rights conventions, and local and regional efforts to address the issue.

The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns have led to a rise in gender-based violence. In this paper, we explore the economic consequences of violence against women in sub-Saharan Africa using large demographic and health survey data collected pre-pandemic. Relying on a two-stage least square method to address endogeneity, we find that an increase in the share of women subject to violence by 1 percentage point can reduce economic activities (as proxied by nightlights) by up to 8 percent. This economic cost results from a significant drop in female employment. Our results also show that violence against women is more detrimental to economic development in countries without protective laws against domestic violence, in natural resource rich countries, in countries where women are deprived of decision-making power and during economic downturns. Beyond the moral imperative, the findings highlight the importance of combating violence against women from an economic standpoint, particularly by reinforcing laws against domestic violence and strengthening women’s decision-making power.

A health-care provider is likely to be the first professional contact for survivors of intimate partner violence or sexual assault. Evidence suggests that women who have been subjected to violence seek health care more often than non-abused women, even if they do not disclose the associated violence. They also identify health-care providers as the professionals they would most trust with disclosure of abuse. These guidelines are an unprecedented effort to equip healthcare providers with evidence-based guidance as to how to respond to intimate partner violence and sexual violence against women. They also provide advice for policy makers, encouraging better coordination and funding of services, and greater attention to responding to sexual violence and partner violence within training programmes for health care providers. The guidelines are based on systematic reviews of the evidence, and cover: 1. identification and clinical care for intimate partner violence 2. clinical care for sexual assault 3. training relating to intimate partner violence and sexual assault against women 4. policy and programmatic approaches to delivering services 5. mandatory reporting of intimate partner violence. The guidelines aim to raise awareness of violence against women among health-care providers and policy-makers, so that they better understand the need for an appropriate health-sector response. They provide standards that can form the basis for national guidelines, and for integrating these issues into health-care provider education.

First Published in 2007. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.