ABSTRACT
Violence against women causes suffering and misery to victims and their families and also places a heavy burden on societies worldwide. It mostly happens within intimate relationships or between people known to each other. We begin by introducing the construct of violence against women as a social construction. Next, data are presented from the international research literature on the prevalence of two major forms of violence against women, physical and sexual victimization by an intimate partner and sexual victimization by men outside intimate relationships. This is followed by a brief review of the debate on the role of gender differences in perpetrating intimate partner violence, critiquing the claim that women are as likely or even more likely than men to show physical aggression against an intimate partner. The predominant explanations of why men engage in aggressive behavior toward women focus on different levels, from the macro level of society to the individual level of the perpetrator. Approaches at preventing violence against women are discussed in the final section.
