ABSTRACT
All over the world, women and girls are disproportionately the victim-survivors of sexual violence, harassment, exploitation and murder, control and assault by intimate partners, and stalking. Perpetrators are mostly men and boys, and mostly known to the women and girls they abuse. In the United States, at least five women per day are murdered by men (Violence Policy Center, 2022). More than one in four women have been raped in their lifetime (Basile et al., 2022). Almost half have been subject to physical violence, contact sexual violence, coercive control and/or stalking by an intimate partner (Leemis et al., 2022). Around a third of women have been stalked (Smith et al., 2022). At least half of women (and likely much higher) experience sexual harassment in the workplace and/or public space. Women of color are most likely to be targeted for violation, and in specific ways and contexts (Davis, 1981; Deer, 2015; Ritchie, 2017, 2022). A 2000 report by the National Advisory Council on Violence Against Women painted a stark picture of the extent and toll of all this violence.
Daily we hear news reports of women and girls being raped, assaulted, stalked, terrorized and brutally murdered, most often by someone the victim knows, someone she once trusted, the father of her children, a colleague, a friend, or an authority figure. Almost always by a man. The costs of this violence – to individual women and their children, families and friends, to their schools and communities, to the economy and to society as a whole – continue to mount. Violence against women shatters women's lives and undermines their potential (National Advisory Council, 2000, p. 1).
