In this blog, Dr. Tara Patricia Cookson and Dr. Lorena Fuentes explore how social protection systems can play a crucial role in addressing gender-based violence (GBV). Drawing from their extensive research, they outline four key pathways and five design features that can help break the cycle of violence and empower women.
Gender-based violence (GBV) impacts millions of women around the globe every year. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that one in three women have been subjected to physical or sexual violence in their lifetime (WHO 2021). GBV is a complex problem: it is driven by discriminatory social norms, power imbalances, and legal structures that undermine women’s rights. Vulnerability to GBV increases with crisis and conflict, low incomes, and inadequate public investment in response services. This complexity means that all development sectors have a role to play in ensuring women enjoy the right to a life free from violence.
Financial insecurity within families is a driver of GBV that social protection actors can readily address.
In 2019, we started collecting data on GBV in the context of the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis in Colombia. More recently, we’ve been interviewing data users, service providers and community leaders about what it takes to address GBV. One of the clearest findings are the links between economic insecurity, isolation and vulnerability to violence. In this quote, a community worker describes a case of a young woman named Marcela who showed up at a GBV workshop:
I have a particular case that touched me a lot…The young woman arrived with her partner…so well we let him stay, he was the one who spoke, the woman was very submissive, her gaze was downcast…After we finished this workshop…he told me “I want to share my experience…when I was a child, my father used to hit us. My father was very cruel to us. One day I was hungry, I took some coins from him and my father grabbed a barbed wire and hit me. Seeing so much violence in the house, I went home.” I asked him, “What is your relationship like with the children?” He said, “I adore my children.” And with your wife? “No, I love her too. I don’t want them to go through what I…suffered.” We trained them all.
Later, the community worker heard a report from a colleague:
“Do you remember the couple, the young woman who came with her partner?” … She said, “Look, this weekend, she went out with her sister to go downtown…[The guy] got angry…When she got home, they started arguing. The neighbours didn’t pay attention because they said that was normal…Many times the police would come, but she would come out to defend him. So, it was normal for them to argue. After about an hour, one of the kids came out screaming: My dad is killing my mom! … Then seeing that the child was really crying, saying ‘my father is killing my mother’, the neighbour went and it turns out that the guy grabbed a small machete and cut all of this off the woman” [speaker points to half of her hand].
When I saw the photo [of her hand] I cried. I cried because I said, why did that young woman allow it? …We had trained them that if they couldn’t talk, they should go to a community leader, they had my number…. I found out that…he wasn’t the children’s father. The guy had been hitting her for a long time. Her mother told her to report him and she said no, that if she reported him, who would take her in with two children? So, the economic part is what we see affects women the most.
This is a case that social protection could have played a role in helping prevent. We’ve reviewed the evidence of how national social protection systems can address gender inequalities through programmes, delivery systems, and linkages to other policies and sectors. When it comes to GBV specifically, the research suggests there are at least nine ways.
Four pathways for addressing GBV through social protection
The first and perhaps most significant way is by softening economic hardship, both reducing tensions within the household and enabling a woman (and her children) to leave and safely land elsewhere if they must.
Second, coordinating national social protection strategies and policies with national plans to end violence against women can foster cross-sectoral synergies at the highest levels of priority setting.
Third, social protection systems can make use of accompaniment models in which frontline workers who are already embedded in communities, connect women and families to a broad range of social services, health, education and labour market programmes. This model recognizes that social protection is only one (important) element of what women need to thrive.
A fourth pathway is training frontline workers to identify GBV and refer women to prevention and response services. While this is conventionally a role for social workers and doctors, sometimes a social protection implementer may be a woman’s closest connection to needed help.
Five social protection design features for addressing GBV
There are also several design decisions that can reduce the risk of GBV. First, programme designers can account for baseline social norms in the delivery context. A social protection programme that has the effect of reducing GBV in one context may exacerbate or have a neutral effect in others. In practice, such considerations may influence how programme designers label and target social protection to address GBV.
Second is benefit eligibility. Waiving requirements for multiple forms of identification or delinking access to benefits from marital status can help ensure social protection is accessible for anyone experiencing GBV.
A third design consideration is benefit quality, including duration, frequency, predictability, and adequacy. All of these are critical for the potential for social protection to meaningfully soften economic hardship and to enable a woman to leave if she chooses. Fourth, the design of information management systems can make privacy and security paramount, ensuring that identifiable social protection data are never made public or used to track women’s locations. Finally, cross-system linkages with other social policy sectors such as housing, childcare, and employment increase the likelihood of addressing the complex risk factors around GBV.
As Marcela’s story indicates, the drivers and risk factors associated with GBV are multiple, but social protection has a significant role to play in ensuring a woman’s right to a life free from violence.
Initial findings from this research were published by UN Women here, and an extended version in Development and Practice, here. Marcela’s story forms part of a forthcoming book by the blog’s authors about the ‘gender data revolution,’ and the possibilities and limitations of gender data to advance feminist policymaking and action.
Dr. Tara Patricia Cookson is the Canada Research Chair in Gender, Development and Global Public Policy at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, and Co-Founder of Ladysmith. She specializes in social protection, care and gender data, and is the author of Unjust Conditions: Women’s Work and the Hidden Cost of Cash Transfer Programs (University of California Press, Open Access).
Dr. Lorena Fuentes is the Co-Founder and Director of Ladysmith, where she leads the portfolios on gender-related violence, social norms and technology and digitization. She is published in the International Handbook on Femicide and Feminicide and has worked with UN Women, UNICEF, and the International Development Research Centre, among others.