Violence against Women and Mental Health

Abstract

This chapter provides a brief overview of the book contents and highlights the policy and programmatic implications. The book provides substantial evidence of the pervasiveness of violence against women across the world. The first section includes a global overview of the prevalence and consequences of violence against women and various regional perspectives from Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and South Africa. All of the chapters highlight how social, cultural and economic factors, particularly gender inequality and women’s low status in society, are root causes of this violence and affect women’s mental health directly as well. The chapters in the second section of the book document the burden of mental ill health among women who have experienced different forms of violence – sexual abuse in childhood, intimate partner violence (IPV), sexual violence; similarly with violence in different settings such as in conflict and among migrants and refugees. Other chapters address violence against women with severe psychiatric illness, sexual abuse perpetrated on patients by health professionals and suicide and intimate partner violence. In spite of this evidence, most mental health policies and programmes do not systematically include consideration of violence issues. Furthermore, mental health services are sorely lacking in low and middle income countries. This is a call for more awareness, for changes in the system and integration of violence issues into mental health policies and into the training curricula for mental health care providers. Increased attention to the primary prevention of all forms of violence is also urgently needed.