Domestic Violence
Domestic violence (often used interchangeably with domestic abuse) is a pattern of abusive behaviour used by one person to gain or maintain power and control over another within a domestic setting — a current or former spouse, partner, or family member. It encompasses physical, sexual, psychological and economic harm, and in practice is rarely a single incident: the abuse that matters most is the sustained pattern of Coercive Control — isolation, intimidation, surveillance and restriction — that physical-injury counts alone fail to capture. While it overlaps heavily with Intimate Partner Violence, “domestic violence” is the broader frame, also covering abuse by relatives and other household members.
Globally it is one of the most common forms of Gender-Based Violence. WHO estimates that roughly 25.8% of ever-partnered women aged 15–49 have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner at least once in their lifetime, and that about 31.6% of women worldwide (around 840 million) have experienced physical/sexual partner violence or non-partner sexual violence. The lethal edge is stark: in 2023 an estimated 140 women and girls were killed every day by an intimate partner or family member. Tools and resources in this vault aim to prevent, interrupt, document or respond to these harms, increasingly mindful that abusers also weaponise technology — see Tech-Enabled Abuse.
In this vault
- Subtype ofGender-Based Violence
- Characterised byCoercive Control
- Related toIntimate Partner Violence
- Manifests inTech-Enabled Abuse