Why take a gendered approach to understanding violence and abuse?
By: Louise Isham
This year, Tuesday 25th November was White Ribbon Day: a day that seeks to raise awareness of the global epidemic of violence against women and girls. White Ribbon Day is also the start of a sixteen-day period of campaigning and awareness raising about violence against women and girls, sometimes referred to as the 16 Days of Action. This year the campaign will end on Wednesday 10th December. In this blog, Dr Louise Isham sets out:
what is understood by the term gender-based violence
the value of adopting a gender-sensitive approach to understanding some forms of violence and abuse
why this is relevant to our research around suicide in women nurses.
What do we mean by ‘gender-based violence?
The term ‘gender based violence’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘violence against women and girls’, i.e. violence directed at a woman, because she is a woman, or ‘violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life’ (United Nations, 1993).
Gender-based violence disproportionately affects women and girls across the globe through certain forms of violence such as child marriage, sexual violence, Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), ‘honour’ killings and trafficking, particularly for purposes of sexual exploitation. It generally refers to violence and abuse that is inter-personal in nature, for example abuse that occurs in families, couples and amongst peers; however, gender-based violence can occur within group and community settings, for example sexual violence perpetrated as an act of war.
It is important to note that not all gender-based violence is perpetrated by men towards women. Trans men and women can be victims of gendered violence and harm (and are often victims in disproportionate numbers), particularly in countries with oppressive and rigid systems of patriarchy. Men can also be victims just as women can perpetrate violence and abuse towards women and girls.
As regards prevalence, the organisation UN Women reported in 2024 that an estimated 50,000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members. This is equivalent to 137 women being killed each day, meaning a woman is killed every 10 minutes (UN Women, 2025a). Yet femicide – when a woman is killed because she is a woman – reflects only the most serious lethal cases of violence against women. Other reports suggest that almost one in three women has been subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or violence by a male non-partner (not including sexual harassment) at some point in their lives (UN Women, 2025b). This equates to 840 million women being affected by gender-based violence worldwide.
The “construction” of gender
Understanding how gender is ‘constructed’ in a social context is important when taking a gendered approach to addressing violence and abuse. Typically, gender-based violence occurs because of – or is at least shaped by - normative expectations as regards gender, along with the unequal power relationships between genders. In this broader definition, violence towards someone because of their gender can be explicitly or implicitly legitimised by patriarchal and sometimes misogynistic cultures, norms and institutions. That is, the violence and abuse that women and girls suffer is inextricably linked to other inequalities they experience: for example, absent or diminished economic power, unequal opportunities in public spheres and infringements on their bodily autonomy enshrined in law, or tacitly upheld by social attitudes. This in part explains why the prevalence of gender-based violence varies across countries and cultures, as well as over time. In the UK, what was considered ‘acceptable’ violence within intimate relationships (particularly between married adults) has, for example, changed over recent decades with marital rape and intimate partner violence no longer being treated as ‘private’ issues that goes on behind closed doors. This example underscores how attitudes and understandings can and do change, even if the process of transformation is at times uneven and difficult.
A gender-sensitive approach
Adopting a gender-sensitive approach, activists, scholars and practitioners pay attention to the ways gender structures individuals’ experiences and choices (or lack of them). This approach – sometimes referred to as adopting a gender-sensitive or feminist ‘lens’– in turn informs how people work to prevent violence and abuse and support victim-survivors. For example, prevention efforts by feminist campaigners might focus on shaping boys’ and girls’ attitudes towards their bodies, relationships, and ideas of power thus seeking to shift beliefs and feelings about gender early in life. Similarly, feminist counsellors and advocates working with sexual violence survivors seek to centre the voices and needs of the children and adults they work with. That is, they take as a starting point that ‘standard’ or ‘clinical’ approaches to emotional distress may unintentionally perpetuate dominant (potentially harmful) ideas about what ‘coping’ and ‘recovery’ look like. E.g. ideas that focus on individual responsibility or that see justice as only a matter of criminal culpability.
Within a gender-sensitive approach it is nevertheless important to recognise that gender discrimination does not operate in a vacuum. Inequalities that are gendered are often compounded by other forms of discrimination and oppression such as those rooted in class, race, ethnicity, able-bodied bias and sexuality. This means that some women and girls are much more likely to suffer gender-based violence and experience repeat victimisation, as well as being less likely to receive timely or effective support from formal support services. For example, women who are disabled, women from the Global Ethnic Majority and women living in poverty. There is therefore growing recognition an intersectional approach is needed in addressing gender-based violence.
Gender-based violence and women nurses
Finally, I want to highlight that inter-personal violence is an issue that female nurses face in their professional and personal lives, often at great costs to their health, wellbeing and sense of safety (Dheensa et al, 2023). Nurses also, often, play a key role supporting victim-survivors affected by gender-based violence in community, clinical and therapeutic settings. Adopting a gendered approach can offer valuable ways of understanding a complex problem that may challenge ‘dominant’ ways of thinking and responding to violence. Importantly, a gender-sensitive approach often resonates with victim-survivors. In parallel, our aim is that our study, ‘revisioning distress and suicidality in women nurses’ will develop valuable and different ways of understanding and supporting women nurses’ experiences of gender-based violence, both as victim-survivors, and the supporters of other victim-survivors.
References
Dheensa, S., McLindon, E., Spencer, C., Pereira, S., Shrestha, S., Emsley, E. and Gregory, A., (2023) ‘Healthcare professionals’ own experiences of domestic violence and abuse: a meta-analysis of prevalence and systematic review of risk markers and consequences’, Trauma, Violence and Abuse, 24(3), pp.1282-1299.
UN General Assembly (1994) Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women issued by the UN General Assembly (1993-94). Available: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/179739?ln=en&v=pdf
UN Women (2025)(a) Women Count: Global Database on Violence against Women and Girls. Available: https://data.unwomen.org/global-database-on-violence-against-women
UN Women (2025)(b) Facts and Figures: Ending Violence Against Women. Available: http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/facts-and-figures