Violence against women harms us all: will measuring the pain help prevent it?
Violence against women harms us all: will measuring the pain help prevent it?
Perhaps if we can quantify the negative impact of violence against women on individuals and wider society, governments might commit to ending it
?w=620&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=bd3d1e4113d2983bb7cad0ba073dc29d
Artist Mandy Joha at a violence against women protest in Guatemala City.
A violence against women protest in Guatemala City. Violence against women and girls has an impact on individuals’ wellbeing, capabilities and economic stability. Photograph: Moises Castillo/AP
Despite the recognition that violence against women (VAW) is a global health emergency – one in three women and girls experience violence at least once in their life from the age of 15 – it has not inspired action by governments. At an individual level, violence immediately affects the health of a woman or girl. The mental and physical health effects can lead to poor earnings, employment instability, and low productivity; they can also result in women being unable to undertake household tasks, like cooking or bringing her children to school, which in turn affects the wellbeing of her children and extended family. These impacts, over a lifetime, reflect a loss of human potential for the individual, her community and the society and economy.
My work is on measuring the impacts to prove the suffering reaches much further than the individual victims, survivors and perpetrators. Violence imposes burdens on the informal systems of family, kinship, and community networks. Some of these impacts can be monetised, such as the cost of seeking healthcare for injuries, and we can easily count these as economic costs. However, this is the tip of the iceberg. Capturing the cost of pain, or the long-term impact on capabilities and potential, is far more difficult, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. It is necessary to look at the costs to families and informal networks, to businesses small and large, and at the ways all of these costs multiply and affect societies over time.
Studies in the global south demonstrate that violence imposes burdens on the informal systems of family, kinship, and community networks. A recent study in Egypt found that the most significant economic impacts are the loss of unpaid care work, the burden placed on families to provide refuge for the woman/girl, and the costs to a family of providing protection for women in the public space.
This shows that the greatest costs of violence against women are absorbed by informal institutions and thus remain invisible to governments and planners, while placing a significant strain on families, communities and societies.
. . .
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/oct/28/violence-against-women-harms-us-all-will-measuring-the-pain-help-prevent-it
= new reply since forum marked as read
