Gender Violence: The Problem

Abstract

This chapter examines the problem (definitions, prevalence, and consequences) of gender violence. Long a significant cause of female morbidity and mortality, gender violence has increasingly become recognized as a human rights and public-health issue, especially within the last three decades. Still, it continues to be a pervasive danger to women and children in both developing and developed societies as data from multi- and cross-national studies indicate. Female infanticide and femicide, domestic violence, rape, mutilation, sex trafficking, dowry deaths, honor killings, incest, and breast ironing—all of which constitute gender violence—are part of a global pattern of violence against women, a pattern supported by educational, economic, and employment discrimination.