Introduction

Women represent eighty-five percent of the victims of gender-based violence, according to the United States Department of Justice, and violence occurs in an estimated twenty-eight percent of marriages in the U.S. and Canada. The Guardian (UK) reported in 2016 that, on average, each week in England and Wales two women were killed by a former partner or boyfriend. ¹ In a survey of 17,000 women and men in Australia, twenty-five percent of women had experienced at least one incident of intimate partner violence. ² Data such as this is available in every nation in the world. In fact, United Nations Women, which manages the Secretary General’s campaign against violence against women, reports that globally some thirty-five percent of women experience intimate partner violence in their lifetimes, with some regions reporting numbers as high as seventy percent. ³ Male survivors represent approximately fifteen percent of all survivors, and up to fifty percent of people in transgender communities have experienced such violence.