DOMESTIC VIOLENCE FACTS AND FIGURES

NATIONAL STATISTICS
A survey conducted by the Gender Centre on Violence Against Women and Children in Ghana concluded the following:

Regarding Rape

• 8% of women reported having been raped.
  
• 21% of women reported having been forced by husbands to have sex.
  
• 95% of these women did not report the incident.
  
• 6% reported having been defiled (of which 78% were defiled by a close relative, acquaintance or authority figure).

Regarding Early Marriage

• 40% married before age 20.

Regarding Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)

• 12% of women reported having been circumcised.
  
• 10% of women reported having siblings who had been circumcised

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Other Statistics

• m(beating, slapping or other physical punishment at the hands of a current or previous partner.
  
• 2 in 4 male partners used words as a form of abuse.
  
• 1 in 4 women had been threatened with a fist or other object that could hurt them.
  
• 1 in 5 women had been prevented from seeing family and friends by partners.
  
• 1 in 10 women had earnings taken away from them.
  
• 1 in 3 women were prevented from speaking to other men.
  
• 1 in 4 women were intentionally humiliated or shamed in front of others
  
• 7 in 10 women had been insulted or angrily shouted at.
  
• 1 in 10 women had male partners hurt people they cared about as a way of hurting them.
  
• 8% of women were prevented from going to work, selling or making money.
  
• 1 in 4 women had been hurt by a partner refusing to provide money and foodstuffs.
  
• 27% of women had been sexually assaulted in their lifetime.
  
• 1 out of 3 women had been fondled or touched against their will.
  
• For 2 out of 10 women, their first experience of sex was by force.
  
• 3 out of 10 women are forced by their male partners to have sex sometimes.
  
• 7% had been forced to touch a man’s private parts.
  
• 6% had been threatened by a schoolteacher or principal that schooling would suffer if they did not consent to have sex.
  
• 15% of women had been circumcised.
  
• The most common perpetrators of violence against women are NOT strangers – rather, the perpetrators are men known to the victims, including both male acquaintances and male relatives.

Items used to beat, slap or physically punish women

• 81% a hand was used to beat.
  
• 6% a belt was used.
  
• 6% other objects were used (cane, pestle, bicycle tire, dog chains etc.).
  
• 4% a stick was used.
  
• 3% a combination of hand and other objects (belt, legs stick).

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INTERNATIONAL STATISTICS

• Domestic battery is the greatest single cause of injury to women in the United States.
  
• Over two thirds of Korean women are beaten regularly by their husbands.
  
• One in two Canadian women can expect to be assaulted at some point in their lives.
  
• In Papua, New Guinea, 61% of people killed in 1981 were women; and almost 73% of adult women murdered between 1979 and 1982 were killed by their husbands.
  
• In Botswana, 24% of men accused of a sex crime were acquitted and discharged due to a lack of evidence against them.
  
• In Chile, 72% of perpetrators of sexual crimes in 1992 were known to their victims.
  
• In South Africa, it is estimated that a woman is raped every 83 seconds; only an estimated one in twenty of these cases is reported to the police.
  
• In Alexandria, Egypt in 1993, 47.1% of women killed had been murdered by a relative after they had been raped.
  
• In detailed surveys in Kenya in 1990, 42% of women reported being beaten regularly by their husbands.
  
• Studies of abused women in the United States have shown that the majority - 73% to 85% - does not experience violence until they have married.
  
• More than 100 million African women and girls are victims of female circumcision or other forms of genital mutilation.
  
• In Bangladesh, killings of women by their husbands account for 50% of all murders.
  
• In Zimbabwe, domestic violence accounts for more than 60% of murder cases that go through the High Court of Harare.

Facts About Marital Rape

• Marital rape is difficult to prove in courts because within marriage ‘consent’ is implied.
  
• Marital rape is just as violent and degrading as any other rape or sexual assault.
  
• Marital rape is the most under-reported crime because of economic dependence, fear, victim’s humiliation, society’s perception that it is not rape, and the victim’s belief that no one will believe her.
  
• No one consents to violence by marrying.
  
• Marital rape involves humiliation, degradation, and victimization by one’s spouse.
  
• In the United States, an estimated one in ten women has been raped by her spouse.

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