Addressing gender-based violence

ActionAid works to end gender based violence and protect women's rights. Our policy and research enables us to make recommendations for change to ensure gender equality and women's empowerment.

Around one in three women and girls worldwide will experience violence in their lifetime.

This violence is rooted in structural inequality, systems built on patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and economic systems that concentrate power in the hands of a few.

Why we work on gender-based violence

Gender-based violence (GBV) affects individuals across the gender spectrum, with particularly severe impacts on women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people.

Our focus on GBV acknowledges that violence is not only intimate partner, domestic, physical, and psychological violence, but also a result of deeply rooted power structures that cause harm through social, economic, political, and cultural systems. This includes violence in digital spaces such as in the gig economy and austerity as violence when reducing public services.

We stand with all women and girls, in particular those disproportionately impacted, women and girls who face multiple, intersecting oppressive systems are more likely to be affected by violence.

This includes, but is not limited to:

Women with disabilities who navigate multiple barriers to support and face increased risk of abuse.
Women from the Global South who confront violence shaped by colonial histories and ongoing economic exploitation.
Indigenous women and girls who experience heightened vulnerability due to colonial legacies and ongoing systemic discrimination.
LGBTQ+ people who encounter targeted violence, especially people of colour.
Migrant and refugee women who must navigate complex systems that often increase their exposure to violence, whilst women in poverty face additional barriers to escaping violent situations due to economic dependence

What is structural violence?

Across 70 countries, our research found that the more equal a society's structures, the less violence women experience.

Violence is a tool that maintains power. It's more prevalent when:

Economic systems keep women dependent and under-resourced.
Laws fail to protect marginalised communities, or actively harm them.
Colonial histories and racist structures determine who gets protection and who doesn't.
Borders, prisons, and policing systems target specific communities.
Cultural narratives blame survivors rather than perpetrators.

How do systems create violence?

Violence is maintained through interconnected systems of power:

Patriarchy teaches us that men should have power over women, making abuse seem normal or inevitable.
Colonialism continues to harm indigenous communities through stolen land, destroyed cultures, and ongoing exploitation.
Economic systems trap women in poverty and dependency, making it dangerous or impossible to leave abusive situations.
Laws and policies often fail to protect the people who need it most, or actively harm them. Police, immigration enforcement, and courts frequently target Black women, migrant women, and LGBTQ+ people rather than protect them.
Cultural institutions, from media to religion to education, reinforce the idea that women, girls, and gender-diverse people are worth less.
Public services like healthcare, housing, and social care routinely discriminate against women, girls, trans, and gender-diverse people, creating barriers to safety and wellbeing.
These systems don't work separately, they reinforce each other. A woman facing violence might also face racism from police, poverty from exploitative work, and discrimination from health services.

Gender-based violence is connected to every issue we work on. We cannot address women's economic justice without challenging the violence that keeps women poor. We cannot tackle climate change without recognising that environmental destruction disproportionately harms women, and that defending land and resources makes women targets for violence.

This is why our work must address structural causes, not just symptoms. Ending violence means changing the systems that create it.

How do we challenge gender-based violence at ActionAid

Women and gender-diverse people facing violence are already resisting, organising, and creating change in their communities. Our role is to support their leadership, not direct it.

Following community leadership

We fund women-led grassroots organisations: particularly Black women, Indigenous women, and those from global-south based communities
We resource existing movements rather than creating new ones
We work in solidarity, taking direction from women's rights movements

Building power not dependency

Communities design their own programmes based on what they know works
We support girls' clubs and feminist education spaces where young people learn their rights and build collective power
We resource economic justice work that challenges exploitation, not just individual 'empowerment'
We challenge racist and colonial attitudes within our own organisation

Responding to crisis

Women's organisations are already first responders in emergencies, we ensure they have resources
During disasters and conflicts, violence against women spikes. Feminists insitu know how to respond; we fund their work
We create safe spaces and legal support led by survivors themselvesViolence isn't just about individual acts, it's built into the way our societies are organised.

Read our latest reports

Falling through the cracks
Tackling the justice deficit for women survivors in Ghana.

The Justice deficit for women in Jordan
A case study of violence and harassment in the workplace.

Promises to keep
A five point plan for achieving the SDG target on VAWG.

Double Jeopardy
Violence against women and economic inequality.

See all ActionAid's policy reports

What are our findings on violence and women's rights?

An analysis of VAWG prevalence in 70 developing countries, commissioned by ActionAid, found that the more gender equal a country is, as defined by the Gender Inequality Index (GII), the lower the prevalence of violence against women.

An ActionAid survey of 47 women’s rights activists worldwide found that almost two thirds (62%) reported feeling less safe over the past two years. Of the respondents who said they felt about the same or safer, over half (56%) still reported cases or harassment or fear of harassment.

In poor countries, women in precarious forms of work are more likely to experience intimate partner violence than those in secure work.

Our recommendations to tackle violence against women and girls

The international community and governments should upscale their support and resourcing for women’s collective action.
Governments should ensure that the elimination of VAWG in private and public spaces is top-level and immediate government business, fulfilling rafts of international commitments made over several decade.
Corporate actors must also be accountable for their part in ending VAWG – inside and outside of the workplace.

Progress on VAWG

Funding for grassroots organisation tackling VAWG

In 2016, the UK government announced a £6 million fund for small and grassroots organisations fighting violence against women and girls. This was partly a response to campaigning and lobbying by civil society, including under the banner of ActionAid’s Fearless campaign.

Grassroots women's organisations working to end VAWG

Having suffered years of domestic abuse at the hands of her husband, Tiwonge, a 40-year-old farmer, found the courage to say enough is enough.

After receiving information and training in human rights from ActionAid, she realised she was a victim of violence and decided to fight for her own rights and also help other women suffering in silence.

“I was asked to chair a meeting of a women’s group," she explains. "I was all dressed up in my best clothes ready to leave when my husband came home and beat me up. So I got to the meeting very late. I looked a total mess, my face was bleeding."

“If my own rights weren’t protected, how could I stand there and chair a meeting about protecting other women?" she realised.

Tiwonge is currently the Executive Director of Chikulamayembe Women’s Forum, one of ActionAid's partners in Malawi, and has worked on over 300 domestic violence cases, helping women recover, speak out, and seek justice.

Our policy work emphasises the vital role that women’s rights organisations like Tiwonge's play in ending violence against women, and calls on governments to increase financial support for their life-saving work.

What does change look like?

Women's rights defenders in multiple countries have successfully campaigned to change laws on domestic violence, marital rape, and child marriage, leading governments, not asking permission. Community networks have trained thousands to recognise abuse and interrupt it. Feminist movements have shut down harmful projects, protected land, and challenged corporate exploitation.

This work happens because of decades of organising, not because outside organisations arrive with solutions.

During COVID-19, when governments failed, women's organisations ran helplines, legal clinics, and safe spaces whilst also caring for their communities. Yet women's rights organisations, especially those led by Black women and indigenous women, receive less than 1% of international development funding.

This isn't an accident. It's how power works: those challenging oppressive systems are systematically under-resourced.

What needs to change to stop gender-based violence?

Ending gender-based violence requires:

Long-term, flexible funding for feminist movements, especially those led by global-south women's rights organisations.
Dismantling racist, colonial, and patriarchal systems, not just reforming them.
Wealthy countries and organisations acknowledging their role in creating global inequality.
Redistributing power and resources, not just offering charity.
Connecting struggles: you cannot have climate justice, economic justice, or racial justice whilst violence against women continues.

Our accountability at ActionAid

As an international organisation, we must continually challenge our own complicity in systems of power.

This means:

Shifting power and resources
Listening more than speaking
Being accountable to grassroots movements
Acknowledging when we get it wrong

Get involved to help end gender-based violence

Ending violence against women requires all of us to challenge the systems we benefit from and the power we hold.

It's not about charity, it's about justice, solidarity, and redistribution of power.

We work to create a world where all women, girls, and people regardless of gender identity or expression, can live free from violence and discrimination.

Find out how you can help.