Violence Against Women and Girls Is a Multifaceted Problem

What science says about risks for violence and the means to end it.

Posted April 9, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is one of the most pervasive human rights challenges of our time. Globally, an estimated one in three women will experience physical or sexual violence in her lifetime (World Health Organization, 2021). But that statistic, staggering as it is, obscures a crucial truth: Violence does not strike equally. Racism, classism, ableism, and more intersect with sexism to create profoundly different levels of risk for women and profoundly different barriers to safety. Ending VAWG requires not only understanding how minds, communities, and institutions work but also understanding whose minds, whose communities, and which institutions bear the heaviest burden.

4 Insights From Psychology

Violence is an intersectional problem.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational work on intersectionality established that sexism does not operate in isolation, but intersects with oppressions based on race, disability, class, and sexual orientation to produce distinct challenges and lived experiences. Decades of research have borne this out in the context of VAWG. A 2023 systematic review found that women with disabilities face elevated rates of intimate partner violence across every form: physical, sexual , psychological, and financial (García-Cuéllar et al., 2023). They also encounter compounding barriers to help-seeking, including physical dependence on their abusers and institutional disbelief (García-Cuéllar et al., 2023).

A 2024 nationally representative U.S. survey found that LGBT+ women were twice as likely as non-LGBT+ women to report recent intimate partner violence (KFF, 2024). Black and Indigenous women face additional risks rooted in structural racism, including the hypersexualization of their bodies, racial bias in legal proceedings, and what researchers have called “intersectional invisibility”: the systematic erasure of their victimization from media narratives and policy agendas (Wallace et al., 2024; Essue et al., 2025). Any framework that treats “women” as a monolithic category will systematically underserve those facing the greatest danger.

Economic dependence is a psychological trap.

Financial abuse , including restricting access to money, employment, or resources, is among the most powerful tools abusers use to maintain control (Johnson, 2008). When a survivor lacks economic independence, leaving is not a matter of willpower , but a structural impossibility. This trap is sharpest at the margins, such as for women with disabilities who may depend on their abuser for physical care, for undocumented immigrants for whom economic precarity is weaponized alongside the threat of deportation, and for women in low-wage work who lack the financial cushion to survive a disruption. Addressing labor inequity, pay gaps, and workplace discrimination is part of addressing VAWG.

Implementation gaps are driven by psychology, not just policy failure.

Laws prohibiting VAWG exist in most jurisdictions. However, they are rarely enforced with consistency. This is partly a resource problem, as nearly 40 percent of surveyed organizations have scaled back or closed services due to funding shortfalls (UN Women, 2024). But it is also a psychological problem. Motivated reasoning can lead police officers, prosecutors, and health workers to filter the facts of cases through their pre-existing beliefs (Kahneman, 2011). For multiply marginalized survivors, institutional bias is compounded: Providers often fail to recognize that these women can be victims of intimate partner violence at all. Shifting implementation requires interventions that surface and directly challenge those beliefs.

Anti-rights movements are winning the messaging war, but science can help.

Well-funded anti-feminist movements have mastered digital platforms, spreading simple and emotionally resonant narratives at scale. Research on misinformation confirms that fluency drives belief . In other words, easy-to-process messages and messages that are repeated multiple times are accepted more often (Hassan & Barber, 2021; Pennycook & Rand, 2019). Human rights messaging, by contrast, tends toward complexity and hedged claims that don’t stick. The science of narrative persuasion offers a corrective: Stories featuring identifiable individuals shift attitudes far more effectively than statistics alone (Green & Brock, 2000). The challenge is deploying them with the same intentionality and centering the stories of women whose experiences have been rendered invisible.

Ending VAWG is a psychological challenge as much as a legal one, and it varies based on victim-survivors’ unique social locations and experiences with oppression. The norms that permit violence, the economic structures that trap survivors, the cognitive biases of professionals, and the information environment shaping public opinion all look different depending on where a woman stands in overlapping systems of power. When researchers, practitioners, and policymakers apply behavioral science with rigor and in partnership with communities most affected, real and lasting change becomes possible.

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