No Place Like Home

In Sweden it’s 28 percent. In Nicaragua, 29. In Uganda it’s 59 percent.

Whether you call it “domestic violence”, “partner violence” or “intimate partner violence” there is one key reality: It’s everywhere. Every country and every culture. Every faith. Every education and economic level. Old and young. Men and women.

Of the 115 countries for which we aggregated the most recent data, the lowest prevalence rate is 5 percent.  But 80 of these countries (just over two-thirds of them) have a rate at or above 20 percent. That means that, in many countries, at least one in five women have experienced violence at the hand of their partner.

Each individual experience of this violence is intensely personal. But when we pull back the lens and look at the bigger picture we can see how much we share across our national and cultural differences – whether it is from a personal story or how this violence affects society.

This is the story we want to share.

Domestic violence exacts costs that bleed from the individual into society.

Those costs may not be evident to all members of a community, but domestic violence burdens the justice and health systems. It also increases demand for social services including shelters and income support, causes lost productivity in the workplace and a resulting overall economic loss due to lost wages and taxes.

For people in violent relationships, the costs are borne in very real and lasting emotional, psychological and physical ways. Some pay with their lives, as our team found in Nicaragua with the death of Johana González.

The law matters. Countries with laws that make beating, maiming or raping a spouse a crime have an average partner violence prevalence rate five percentage points lower than countries that do not have such laws.

Our cultural habits and social norms prescribe much of the way women and men interact. Understanding domestic violence requires exploring those norms and the social conditioning that forms them. So often, partner violence is seen through the prism of gender, and as a “women’s” issue.

That is not the case. Gender-based behavior is often taught and learned at a young age. Girls learn to be accommodating. Boys learn to be macho. Leveling the balance of power between the sexes must play a role.

We’ve looked at how important the attitude that women hold towards domestic violence is in a society. Let’s look a little more at men. Men as perpetrators. Men as victims. Men as agents of change in shifting our cultures.

So, what’s being done to address this very specific and pernicious type of violence that unfolds in homes everywhere.

There’s no silver bullet, no single or simple solution for this complex social issue. On a global level, our data analysis tells us that laws matter, social attitudes matter, gender equality and financial access matter. Our deeper data dive on Uganda may help us recognize the pathways forward.

We know that physical and sexual violence between intimate partners is everywhere, not limited to any particular community. It occurs across the artificial boundaries we have built to differentiate ourselves: nationality, language, religion, culture, economic station or education level.

So, if this type of violence is so prevalent, why is it so invisible to the rest of us as we go about our daily lives? Why don’t we notice? And if we do notice, why don’t more of us speak up? What should we say when we do speak up?

These are hard questions.

There is no single or simple answer.

Our data analysis found that passing legislation, changing social attitudes towards domestic violence and improving gender equality are important factors in the discussion of domestic violence.  Coupled with the opinions of the experts and others we spoke with, there is reason to believe that these things may even help prevent domestic violence from happening in the first place.

Once this type of abuse has begun, even if victims get out of an abusive relationship, it doesn’t guarantee a happy ending. Antoine divorced his abusive wife and plans to marry again. Graciela is in a shelter, struggling to build a new life. However, Johana divorced her abusive husband but he still hunted her down and killed her in front of a group of schoolchildren.

Women can’t fix this. Men can’t fix this. Only we, as members of our communities, can collaboratively and collectively work in concert to diminish this prevalent, painful and costly societal challenge. If we don’t, what does it say about us?