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With the Office of the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, UNFPA convened an Expert Group Meeting to gather current and past research and information by leading media organizations, news entities and key women journalists on the status, consequences and causes of threats to women journalists worldwide. The findings and the submissions received following a call for input issued by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women contributed to the report the Special Rapporteur presented at the 44th session of the UN Human Rights Council in June 2020.
The kNOwVAWdata initiative supports safe and ethical prevalence and administrative data collection, analysis and reporting through technical assistance as well as capacity development programmes. From 2018 to 2019, 65 UNFPA staff participated in the kNOwVAWdata curriculum course from 19 countries. In December 2020 the course was adjusted to an online format which enabled an additional 50 participants, from all regions, to undertake the course. Currently 32 UNFPA staff and close to 100 external participants are enrolled in the course curriculum from over 36 countries. Under the UNFPA flagship programme for disability inclusion, The We Decide Global Initiative, one key focus area is ending violence against women with disabilities and building UNFPA internal capacities accordingly. The UNFPA We Decide Disability Inclusion Guidelines have been implemented in 74 Country Offices. Within the scope of the Joint Programme for UN Partnership for Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNPRPD) “Building Back Better for All”, UNFPA produced resources that strengthen disability inclusive COVID-19 response and recovery in connection to GBV and SRHR. UNFPA staff was trained on how to use these tools and resources.Under the UNFPA flagship programme for disability inclusion, The We Decide Global Initiative, one key focus area is ending violence against women with disabilities and building UNFPA internal capacities accordingly. The UNFPA We Decide Disability Inclusion Guidelines have been implemented in 74 Country Offices. Within the scope of the Joint Programme for UN Partnership for Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNPRPD) “Building Back Better for All”, UNFPA produced resources that strengthen disability inclusive COVID-19 response and recovery in connection to GBV and SRHR. UNFPA staff was trained on how to use these tools and resources.
UNFPA supports the global geospatial knowledge platform to assist in knowledge sharing related to the prevalence of intimate partner violence for 119 countries and their subregions. A geospatial dashboard on IPV was launched in December 2020, and an accompanying report on IPV data was published in May 2021.
During emergencies, UNFPA is a lead agency in enabling safe and ethical service data collection and management, including coordinating the GBV Information Management System (GBVIMS) Steering Committee (UNFPA, UNICEF, UNHCR, IRC and IMC). Online (Primero/GBVIMS+) and offline (GBVIMS) GBV case management and incident monitoring systems facilitate safe and ethical GBV data collection and sharing in order to support a continuous process of evaluation in the improvement and coordination of services to ensure that survivor-centered care is supported, and support quality service provision by providing a set of tools which help service providers to support survivors in an integrated manner. GBVIMS and GBVIMS+ are currently used by 159 non-governmental organisations (139 national and 20 international) and engage 12 UN entities in 25 countries.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, UNFPA was at the forefront in projecting the impact of women and girls. In April 2020, UNFPA, Avenir Health and Johns Hopkins University published modelled data on the impact of the pandemic on gender-based violence, female genital mutilation and child marriage. This model has been highly cited to exemplify the devastating effects of the pandemic on efforts to end VAW. UNFPA estimated that if the lockdown continued for 6 months, 31 million additional gender-based violence cases could be expected, and for every 3 months of continued lockdown, an additional 15 million additional cases of gender-based violence were to be expected. It was also estimated that 2 million cases of FGM and 13 million cases of child marriage that could have been otherwise prevented, would occur as a consequence of the pandemic.
UNFPA is undergoing a costing exercise for GBV programs at country level. By August 2021, the cost of UNFPA’s GBV prevention and response programmes had been estimated for 9 countries.
As of 2021, 15 GBV prevalence surveys and 24 countries have benefited from the kNOwVAW data capacity building initiative. This initiative also supported 9 countries in the Asia Pacific to publish reports with findings of a VAW prevalence survey.
In November 2020, the East Asia and Pacific Regional Offices of UNFPA, UN Women and UNICEF launched a joint study exploring and illustrating the interlinkages between violence against women and violence against children in four countries, namely Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Viet Nam.
In 2015, UNFPA and UNDP Burkina Faso supported the creation of a universal form allowing police units and offices for the promotion of women’s rights on decentralized level to collect data on violence against women and girls. Data collection is on-going, again with the support of UNDP. Moreover, UNDP also supported the creation of a tool for data collection and analysis, allowing the monitoring of violence on a regional and national basis.
UNHCR is a founding member of the Gender-Based Violence Information Management System and sits on its Steering Committee along with UNFPA, IRC, IMC and UNICEF. UNHCR is working to strengthen and harmonize data collection on SGBV by implementing the GBVIMS in selected operations. In 2015, UNHCR provided technical support in data collection and analysis to 22 countries.