WHO: 316 million women faced sexual violence in past year, progress ‘painfully slow’

A new World Health Organisation (WHO) report has revealed that an estimated 316 million women and 12.5 million adolescent girls worldwide were subjected to sexual or physical violence in the past 12 months, underscoring the scale and persistence of what the agency described as a global human rights crisis.

Released ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on 25 November, the report warns that violence against women has shown almost no improvement in two decades. According to WHO data, nearly one in three women, about 840 million globally, have experienced intimate partner or sexual violence at some point in their lives, a figure that has remained largely unchanged since 2000.

In the last year alone, 11 per cent of women aged 15 and above were subjected to physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner. Among adolescent girls aged 15 to 19, around 12.5 million, or 16 per cent, reported similar experiences.

Progress on reducing intimate partner violence has been “painfully slow”, with the global decline averaging just 0.2 per cent annually over the past twenty years.

For the first time, the WHO has included national and regional estimates of non-partner sexual violence. It found that 263 million women have been assaulted by someone other than a partner since the age of 15, though experts believe the real figure is far higher due to under-reporting driven by stigma and fear.

“Violence against women is one of humanity’s oldest and most pervasive injustices, yet still one of the least acted upon,” WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement. “No society can call itself fair, safe, or healthy while half its population lives in fear.”

The report also highlights chronic underfunding of prevention and support programmes, warning that humanitarian crises, rapid technological change and widening socio-economic inequality are exposing more women and girls to harm.

The WHO has urged governments to strengthen survivor-centred services across health, legal and social sectors; scale up proven prevention strategies; improve data collection systems; and firmly enforce laws designed to protect and empower women and girls.

With IANS inputs