More EAs are working on violence against women - Here's why

By I.J.J. @ 2024-12-10T12:58 (+14)

Today is the last day of the Global Campaign ‘16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence.’ This campaign highlights the staggering fact that every 10 minutes, a woman is killed by her partner or a family member. 

In this blog post, I want to shed light on this often overlooked problem within the EA community. I’d like to acknowledge the efforts of Dr. Akhil Bansal, who has positioned violence against women and girls (VAWG) as a cause area, and Founders Pledge, whose research has provided valuable recommendations for promising interventions. I believe this issue deserves even more attention, for which I will use the traditional scale, neglectedness, and tractability framework to explain why. At the end, I discuss the different initiatives within the EA community.

Disclaimer: I’m the co-founder of NOVAH, an AIM-incubated non-profit working on preventing violence against women.

The scale of Gender-Based Violence

To start with some numbers:

• One in three women worldwide—740 million women—have experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetimes.
• Most of this violence is committed by current or former intimate partners, with 640 million women (1 in 4) ever affected by intimate partner violence (IPV).
• In 2023 alone, 51,100 women and girls were killed by their partners or other family members. 

This form of violence is called gender-based violence because it is rooted in gender inequality and the unequal distribution of power. 

Intimate partner violence (IPV), more commonly known as domestic abuse, is a specific type of gender-based violence and a pervasive global issue with varying prevalence rates. For instance, over one year, 5% of women in Europe and North America experienced violence from an intimate partner, compared to 19% in South Asia and 24% in Eastern Sub-Saharan Africa. IPV leads to a significant health burden of 7 million years of healthy life lost annually due to interpersonal violence, major depression, and HIV/AIDS. IPV's health impact surpasses that of natural disasters, hepatitis, syphilis, or dengue. 

Other forms of GBV include female genital mutilation, honor killings, forced sex, and others. GBV’s health impacts have been described in detail by Akhil’s original post on this topic.

Note: figures and ratios are computed for women within the 18- to 54-year-old range (available data), and ratios on women affected by IPV are computed among ever-partnered women.

The economic toll of GBV

The effects of GBV go beyond health, resulting in significant economic losses, including:

• Direct costs: healthcare, counseling, and justice system expenses.
• Indirect costs: income loss for affected women and their households, decreased productivity, missed workdays, fewer job opportunities, and more part-time work.

For example, across the European Union alone, the cost of GBV is estimated at €152 billion annually. Moreover, IMF research shows that a 1 percentage point increase in GBV prevalence can reduce economic activity by up to 8%.

An intergenerational cycle

Violence against women doesn’t just harm individual victims—it cuts across generations. Children exposed to the violence face poorer physical and mental health outcomes, both in childhood and adulthood. Research shows that:

• IPV in a household elevates child mortality rates under five by as much as 1 percentage point.
• Children growing up in violent homes are later more likely to become perpetrators or victims themselves, perpetuating a cycle of violence.

GBV is neglected

Despite its scale and impact, GBV remains underfunded and under-prioritized. For IPV in particular:

• Prevention receives only 0.2% of total official development aid.
• Progress in reducing IPV is slow, with just a 0.2% annual decline in low- and middle-income countries.

Climate change worsens the issues, as increasing resource scarcity is projected to increase IPV prevalence. Research indicates that if climate action fails and global temperatures rise by 4°C, the number of IPV cases in sub-Saharan Africa could nearly triple by 2060 from 48 million to 140 million.

GBV is tractable

Although GBV is a global problem with a slow decline, in recent years, more evidence has been generated showing that the problem is tractable. Drivers of intimate partner violence are now better understood and RCTs have shown the promising effectiveness of several interventions. 

Where we stand

• Non-EA organizations have published evidence-based reviews comparing the effectiveness of different interventions (see e.g., Prevention Collaborative, WHO’s RESPECT framework, UK-funded WhatWorks2).
• People within the EA community have started to research, compare and prioritize interventions based on cost-effectiveness and evidence bases (Akhil, Founders Pledge). Specific interventions have been recommended (e.g. one doing community activism) and a fund has been created and managed by TLYCS (5 charities currently recommended). A campaign is currently being carried out by High Impact Athletes (join and support them!). And in 2025, Ark Philanthropy, a high-impact grantmaking advisory for major philanthropists, will focus on gender-based violence, by prioritizing interventions, supporting nonprofits, and advancing research on the topic. With NOVAH, we’re glad to be part of this growing movement and aim to design and test a mass-media intervention that AIM’s research report indicated could be promising. 

How to engage with this topic

If you want to contribute to the movement, you can consider:

• Starting conversations with people about this often-overlooked problem
• Donating to the TLYCS fund or joining the campaign 1in3 by HIA
• Talking about the existence of evidence reviews and cost effectiveness comparison to people already connected to the cause
• Keeping up to date with research (I’d recommend the SVRI newsletter) & interventions (I’d recommend the Prevention Collaborative one).

If you’re an EA working on GBV and were not mentioned, please contact me at ivy@novah.ngo so I can update this post.