About
Nearly one in four women around the world experiences sexual violence during her lifetime, according to the World Health Organization. Up to a third of all women have been physically assaulted by an intimate male partner. Survivors of gender-based violence often underreport their experiences because of social stigma, fears about their safety, and lack of appropriate response from institutions meant to protect them. Well over a billion people—about a fifth of the world’s population—live in absolute poverty. A large proportion of the world’s population is affected by widespread violence and instability. Most of these people live in poor countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Poverty has structural roots and causes; low wage jobs, de-industrialization, corruption, domestic and sexual violence. Poverty is experienced on a personal level—woman-by-woman, home-by-home, child-by-child. Poverty leaves deep scars, like war. Poverty is often accompanied with stigma and shame. Poverty appears as both the platform for violence and the result of the violence exerted by society on the weakest, most vulnerable of its members.
Why is poverty often associated with violence? Poverty and gender based violence (GBV) interact in complex cycles of causality. Poverty can be a causal factor in GBV, and vice versa. It is not only poor women who experience violence, and not all women living in poverty are abused, however poverty increases women’s vulnerability to GBV by increasing their exposure to potentially violent situations and reducing their ability for avoidance or escape. In emergency situations, too, women’s poverty, especially when coupled to childrearing responsibilities and/or the lack of male protection, can render them vulnerable to GBV. Violence perpetuates poverty, low growth rates, and the underdeveloped status of low-income countries. Violence kills, injures, and displaces people and increases poverty, hunger, and deprivation. Poverty has various levels: including lack of income and productive resources sufficient to ensure a sustainable livelihood, hunger and malnutrition, ill health, limited or lack of access to education and other basic services, increasing morbidity and mortality from illness, homelessness and inadequate housing, unsafe environments, and social discrimination and exclusion. Poverty is also characterized by lack of participation in decision-making and in civil, social, and cultural life. It occurs in all countries as mass poverty in many developing countries and as pockets of poverty amidst wealth in developed countries. GBV is a human rights issue, a global public health epidemic, and a barrier to sustainable development. GBV originates from and underpins power imbalances between the sexes. GBV occurs at personal, household, community, national, and international levels. On all of these levels, men use violence to exert power and control over women. GBV prevents women from their inalienable rights, be they economic, social, cultural, civil and/or political. Societal risk factors that contribute to the occurrence of gender-based violence and place certain groups at greater risk include:
- Gender-based inequality
- Unacknowledged violence
- Limited decision-making power
- Magnification of male power and entitlement
- War and Genocide
- Absent or weak sanctions and lack of human services
- Poverty
- Persistance and prevalence of customary law
- Under-representation in political and legal structures