When COVID-19 swept across the world in early 2020, countries fell like dominoes into states of lockdown. In this environment, concern grew that violence against women perpetrated within their own families – mostly by husbands or intimate partners – would escalate. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) projected that COVID-19 would cut global progress towards ending gender-based violence within this decade by at least one-third.
Efforts to collect this data have continued, however. This information is key to shedding light on the fact that violence against women is a critical global public health emergency that requires ongoing attention.
Over the years, governments and development partners have realized the impact of violence against women on individual health, family stability, and society as a whole. The UN Sustainable Development Goals also include hard targets on elimination of all forms of violence against women and call for collection of data to show advances towards this. Countries need robust data to understand the extent and dimensions of this issue, and to measure progress towards addressing it.
In the “big data” era, collecting information has never been easier. Researchers can gather huge amounts of data passively, with digital tools such as social media and mobile technology providing unprecedented reach. These tools are inadequate to measure the prevalence of violence against women, however, while administrative data such as police, hospital or helpline records only reveal part of the problem. Population-based surveys can go much further in painting a more accurate picture. It was out of this realization that the kNOwVAWdata initiative was born to help collect and understand data on violence against women (VAW).
The kNOwVAWdata initiative was launched in 2016 by UNFPA’s Asia-Pacific Regional Office supported by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It enables individuals, research teams and countries to collect reliable, comparable prevalence data in a way that protects and empowers both those collecting the data and the women who share their stories and experiences. The initiative is built on existing gold standard practice methods and tools.
Some violence against women is rooted in social norms around discipline; some is an expression of an ownership ideology towards women and girls. The kNOwVAWdata surveys use in-depth, mixed-methods research that both quantifies prevalence and yields qualitative data to tell women’s individual stories. This helps to lift the veil and reveal the origins and dimensions of different types of violence against women.
Conducting a VAW survey can be an experience that is both heart-rending and uplifting in equal measure. This was the case in Mongolia, for example, where the kNOwVAWdata team worked with the National Statistics Office to design and implement the country’s first national VAW survey in 2017. That summer, 15 teams fanned out across all 21 of Mongolia’s provinces, overcoming logistical challenges, a forbidding landscape and harsh weather conditions to interview more than 7,300 women.
One of these interviewers, Badmaa, explains the sense of mission and the strong empathy researchers everywhere take with them to the field. “I wanted to help women like me who have experienced violence,” she says. “I could see my own life flash before my eyes when I listened to them. Sometimes when the women were afraid I told them about my own story and they were able to open up to me.”
A Guest Editorial