All statistics are from Fact Sheet on Gender Violence, published by the UN Non-Governmental Agency UNIFEM, and available at the SDVS office.

Relationship/Domestic Violence

• In Papua New Guinea, 67% of rural women and 56% of urban women have been victims of wife abuse, according to a national survey conducted by the Papua New Guinea's Law Reform Commission.
• In India, there have been 1,259 dowry-related murders in the last 3 years, according to official government statistics. This estimate is widely regarded as low.
• In Bangladesh, assassination of women by their husbands accounts for 50% of all murders.
• In a random sample of Norwegian gynecological patents, 25% of women who had ever lived in a relationship had been physically and/or sexually abused by their partner.
• A 1990 study of 1,000 women in Sacatepequez, Guatemala, found that 49% have been physically, sexually or emotionally abused, 75% by an intimate male partner.
• A statistical survey conducted in Netzahualcoyotl, a city adjacent to Mexico City, found that one in 3 women had been victims of family violence; 20% report blows to the stomach during pregnancy.
• According to the former Surgeon General Koop, 3-4 million women in the US are beaten by their partners each year. Studies on prevalence suggest that from 1/5 to 1/3 of all women will be physically assaulted by a partner or ex-partner during their lifetime.
• Battering is the single greatest cause of injury among women in the US, accounting for more emergency room visits than auto accidents, muggings, and rapes combined.

Sexual Assault and Rape

• Three studies of women who resisted assault revealed that 44% of 600 women were able to avoid rape and to deter the attacker. In 1985, a large national study of women who reported assaults was analyzed by researchers. They found that most of the survivors did resist in physical ways, and that their resistance did NOT increase the violence, rather it decreased the violence. Additional studies indicate the individuals who resist IMMEDIATELY upon the onset of an assault (hence the importance of understanding what assault is) have a higher success rate of escape/avoidance that those who do not resist or who wait until they are trapped and feel they cannot resist.
• Based on these studies, FIST (Feminists in Self-Defense Training, Olympia, WA) states that there are three times as many rapes attempts as completed rapes. Most women in these studies only had to use verbal statements to avoid an assault. In the case of acquaintance assault (80% of all assaults), assertiveness and verbal resistance has been found to be highly effective as well.
• In the Maternity Hospital of Lima, Peru, 90% of young mothers aged 12 to 16 have been raped by their father, stepfather or a close relative.
• In the US, a woman reports a rape to the police every 5 to 6 minutes. Researchers estimate that only 1/3 of strangers rapes and 13% of all acquaintance rapes are reported to the police.
• 10-14% of all married women in the US and at least 40% of battered wives have been raped by their husbands.
• An island-wide random survey of women on Barbados revealed that nearly 1/3 have been sexually abused during childhood or adolescence.
• Every 1 1/2 minute a women is raped in South Africa, totally approximately 386,000 women raped each year.
• 683,000 women are raped each year in the US according to the National Women's Study. This translates to 1 every 3 minutes, 78 per hour, 1,871 per day.
• Of the 4,008 subjects in the study who were raped, 84 did not report the assault.

Other Forms of Violence of Violence Against Women

• In the US, 9 out of 10 women murdered are killed by men; most are at the hands of a male partner.
• Discrimination against girl children are so strong in the Punjab state of India that girl children aged 2 to 4 die at twice the rate of boys. Among 45 developing countries for which recent data are available, there are only two where mortality rates for girls ages 1-4 are not higher that that of boys.
• Data from the UN High Commission of Refugees on violence against Vietnamese boat people indicates that 39% of women are abducted and/or raped while at sea. These statistics likely underestimates the problem given women's reluctance to admit violation and the difficulty of documenting abductions.
• According to the World Health Organization more than 80 million women have undergone "female circumcision" or female genital mutilation, in Africa alone.
• A recent survey by the Inter-Africa-Committee estimates that half of Kenya's maternal mortality rate of 170 per 100,000 live births is due to circumcision's infibulation and/or other harmful traditional practices.
• In one study of 33 infibulated Somali women, all had to have extensive episiotomies (cutting) during childbirth, and their second stage labor was five times longer than normal; five of their babies died, and 21 suffered oxygen deprivation due to the long and obstructed labor.