Mar 2012 - Jan 2013

The Violence Against Children Survey part of the Together for Girls Initiative (including UNICEF, UN Women, UNFPA, UNAIDS and WHO as partners) has collected prevalence of and circumstances surrounding violence, targeting females and males aged 13-24, and has already been completed in Kenya, Haiti and Zimbambwe. Results were released in Zimbabwe and Kenya, in May and Novemer 2012, respectively. The results will be released in Haiti, in early 2013.

UNAIDS supported countries to collect data and report on the proportion of ever-married or partnered women aged 15-49 who experienced physical or sexual violence from a male intimate partner in the past 12 months. This was reported for the first time in the 2012 UNAIDS Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic http://www.unaids.org/en/media/unaids/contentassets/documents/epidemiology/2012/gr2012/20121120_UNAIDS_Global_Report_2012_en.pdf

UNFPA and UNICEF completed the inception phase of a joint global evaluation of the UNFPA-UNICEF Joint Programme on FGM/C.

UNFPA, supported by AusAID, has carried out research on the sexual and reproductive health needs of women with a disability in Kiribati, Solomon Islands and Tonga, and carried out a study on prevalence and women’s health, in Samoa, in Republic of Marshall Islands, Cook Islands, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, and Nauru. It aslo supported data collection in the Central American region, in collaboration with INGO Ipas.

UNFPA supported the UN Special Rapporteur on VAW (SRVAW) on the global research relating to the interpretation and implementation of the international law principle of the due diligence obligations of States in the promotion and protection of women’s human rights in general and to a life free of violence in particular.

Two WHO systematic reviews of prevalence and risk factors of violence against sex workers and its links to HIV were finalized and submitted for publication. A recommendation to address violence against women was integrated into WHO Guidelines for Sex Workers released in December 2012. Further information available at:http://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/topics/violence/en/index.html; http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/en/

WHO held consultations among researchers from different parts of the world on interventions research for addressing violence against women in health care settings in order to identify common tools, methodologies and ethical considerations for undertaking such research. As outcomes of the meeting, an international network of researchers conducting interventions was launched and a handbook of interventions research will also be developed.

A randomized controlled trial of a counseling-empowerment intervention in antenatal care settings is being supported by WHO in two countries in Southern Africa. This intervention has been shown to be effective in other settings but will be tested in a low resource, high HIV prevalence setting for the first time.

Two research papers, from the WHO Multi-country Study on Women's Health and Domestic Violence database, examine the risk and protective factors for intimate partner violence among young women (15-24 years old) and the association between intimate partner violence and induced abortion, respectively.

WHO, in partnership with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the Medical Research Council in South Africa, is finalizing global and regional estimates of prevalence of intimate partner violence and non-partner sexual violence, drawing upon up to date data from 90 countries. Estimates of the health impacts of violence against women are also being produced.