GBV Patterns
GBV Patterns
Three clocks, five hypotheses, a thirty-year diplomatic timeline and the price of a life in lost earnings. This page holds the context a hearing room asks for after the numbers.
Four counters run at the most recent global rates, counting from midnight in your time zone, with a countdown to the next. They are estimates spread evenly over a year, which is not how violence happens, but it is how its scale becomes legible.
Rates: UNODC and UN Women, Femicides in 2024; UNICEF, child marriage data; UNDP and UN Women, cost of violence against women. The GDP figure is an older estimate the UN continues to cite and is marked for verification on the methodology page.
What the strongest available national and global measures say, before any analysis of our own. Each figure links to its source on the sources page.
A study of advance and regress in women's rights over time, and of when gender policy peaked in national politics, is on the backlog with candidate sources: World Bank Women, Business and the Law (1970 to present), V-Dem Women's Political Empowerment Index (1900 to present), the Comparative Agendas Project for bill counts by year.
In October 2024 UNICEF published its first global estimate of sexual violence against children, from 120 countries and territories over 2010 to 2022. Together with its child marriage data, this is the floor under everything else on this site: the violence starts before adulthood.
UNICEF, New global data expose acute prevalence of violence against children, October 2024. UNICEF Data, Child marriage. UNICEF, Global Annual Results Report 2024, child protection. UNICEF USA, Child marriage: latest trends and future prospects. ENDGBV 2024 fact sheet for the New York figure.
The CDC's 2023 to 2024 survey is the first national measure since 2016. It is a survey of what people say happened to them, which makes it the opposite of the police figures below: the survey counts what is rarely reported, and the police count what was.
CDC, NISVS 2023/2024 Sexual Violence Data Brief; NSVRC, CDC releases new sexual violence data. RAINN, Statistics. NYPD, CompStat citywide report. The survey excluded people under 18, transgender and nonbinary people, people in institutions and people experiencing homelessness, which are among the groups most exposed. Rising complaints can reflect rising reporting; see the hypotheses below.
Most rape happens young. The CDC asked victims how old they were the first time.
CDC, NISVS 2010 Summary Report; CDC, NISVS 2016/2017 Report on Intimate Partner Violence. Age-at-first-victimisation figures are from older survey waves; the 2023/2024 brief has not republished them.
New York's incident reports count police responses. The CDC's survey counts what women say happened to them, whether or not anyone was called. The 2023 to 2024 intimate partner violence brief is the first since 2016.
CDC, NISVS 2023/2024 Intimate Partner Violence Data Brief. Response rate 16.5%; the survey excluded under-18s, transgender and nonbinary people, people in institutions and people experiencing homelessness.
The same platforms that carry the sex-buyer reviews carry the hate. This section shows how misogyny appears on social media, how much of it women receive, how it is fed to boys, and at what age children first meet pornography.
Not consent, exposure. Most children meet pornography before they are teenagers, and most of the first contact is not something they went looking for.
Common Sense Media, Teens and Pornography, January 2023. Economist Intelligence Unit, Measuring the prevalence of online violence against women, 2021. UN Women, Accelerating efforts to tackle online and technology-facilitated violence against women and girls, 2022. CDC NISVS 2023/2024 sexual violence brief. Hope not Hate and Internet Matters polls, 2023, and the recommendation experiment, cited via the ACAMH review, secondary. Children's Commissioner figure marked to verify.
New York City's domestic violence homicides moved from 62 in 2021 to 71 in 2022 to 73 in 2023 to 66 in 2024. Nearly one in four governments told UN Women they faced a backlash against women's rights in 2024. Each hypothesis below says what would be true if it held, and how this project will test it. None is confirmed yet.
Reported incidents rise while deaths, which are hard to hide, stay flat. New York City's incident reports fell slightly from 2023 to 2024 while intimate partner homicides rose from 30 to 33, which cuts against a pure reporting effect.
Compare CDC WISQARS and FBI female homicide series, which do not depend on willingness to report, with police incident reports and hotline calls, which do.
Perpetrator age skews younger over time and misogynistic-attitude keywords appear more often in recent cases. Women Count USA codes incel traits, misogynistic hate speech and online grooming per case.
Perpetrator age distribution by year from the database, plus attitude surveys such as the Global Institute for Women's Leadership and Ipsos tracking, once aggregation is agreed. The online section above holds the exposure evidence: 80% of British boys aged 16 to 17 had consumed Tate content by 2023, and blank teen accounts are fed the manosphere within minutes.
Shelter denials and length of stay track homicide counts. New York denied shelter to 24,635 people in 2024 and the average city stay was 115 days, nearly three times the rest of the state.
Year-by-year state dashboard figures against homicide counts by county, controlling for population.
A step change in 2020 to 2022 that persists. New York City's homicide series fits this shape; incident reports do not show the same step.
Interrupted time series on monthly city data from 2017 to 2025.
A material share of women killed by men in New York are killed by buyers or exploiters, and these cases are filed outside domestic violence or not identified as femicide at all.
Count sex-trade cases in Women Count USA by state and year, then read how each was reported. This is what the project exists to produce.
City counts: ENDGBV annual reports 2022 to 2024. Backlash figure: UN Women, Women's Rights in Review 30 Years After Beijing (March 2025).
The world has agreed, in writing, to end violence against women many times. The question for 2026 is whether the language is getting stronger or being traded away. Red marks the moments of pushback.
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. The United States signed in 1980 and has never ratified it.
The General Assembly defines violence against women for the first time, including violence in the family, in the community and condoned by the state.
189 governments adopt twelve critical areas of concern. Violence against women is one. Trafficking and prostitution are named inside it.
Women, peace and security enters the Security Council's agenda. Nine follow-on resolutions by 2019.
The first UN resolution on femicide by name. Adopted by the General Assembly, not the Security Council, and renewed as 70/176 in 2015. It asks states to collect data and to criminalise and investigate these killings.
The Commission on the Status of Women agrees conclusions on eliminating violence against women after a failure to agree in 2003 and 2012.
Target 5.2 commits every state to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls, including trafficking and sexual exploitation, by 2030.
Trafficking in persons in conflict situations. The closest the Council has come to CATW's subject, and the only Council hook for it.
In UN Women's Beijing+30 review, nearly a quarter of governments say women's rights faced a backlash in 2024.
CSW69 adopts a political declaration on the thirtieth anniversary after difficult negotiations. Civil society groups say the consensus came at the cost of language on sexual and reproductive rights.
UNODC and UN Women publish the first global femicide estimate built from 117 countries. One woman or girl every ten minutes. Fewer countries are reporting than before.
No femicide definition in state law. This project, with CATW, builds the case for one.
The Council's mandate is international peace and security. Its gender agenda, Women, Peace and Security, covers women in armed conflict and conflict-related sexual violence, not killings in peacetime. Femicide is handled as crime and human rights by the General Assembly's Third Committee, the Commission on the Status of Women, UNODC, UN Women, the CEDAW Committee and the Special Rapporteur on violence against women. The Council is also the one body where a single veto blocks a new agenda item, and several permanent members have resisted widening its gender work. The practical venues for New York's case are therefore the General Assembly femicide resolutions and CSW, with the Council's trafficking resolutions as the one point of contact.
The absence is a choice, not a rule. Four grounds on which femicide belongs on the international agenda, each tied to something this site documents.
What the platform shows, in that order: the scale (the clocks and the ten figures), the duty (the law above), the intersection (the uncounted sex-trade line in the ledger), and the cost of not counting (the gap and the economics).
Sources listed on the sources page. The backlog holds a planned text-mining pass over General Assembly, Security Council and CSW documents to count how often femicide and violence against women appear by year.
The same decade seen from inside American and New York politics. Red marks the moments that moved against women's rights or cut the systems that count and protect. Entries marked to verify are from secondary reporting.
Sexual violence becomes a mass political subject. Reporting rises in the years after, which the hypotheses page treats as a measurement problem as much as a change in violence.
S5988A removes the need to prove force, fraud or coercion when the victim is under 18. Delaware and New Jersey become the first states to ban child marriage.
Opens a look-back window for civil claims by survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
Lockdowns trap women with abusers. New York City's domestic violence homicides rise from 62 in 2021 to 71 in 2022 and 73 in 2023, and have not returned to the earlier level.
Rhode Island follows the same year.
The Equality Model bill for New York, developed with survivors. Decriminalises people in prostitution, holds buyers and exploiters accountable. Not yet passed.
The Supreme Court ends the federal right to abortion. Reproductive coercion is one of the keywords Women Count USA codes in femicide cases.
The precedent New York's bill points to.
Reem Alsalem frames the system of prostitution as exploitation and a human rights abuse, the position CATW's New York bill rests on.
A one-year window for adult survivors of sexual offences to sue regardless of the statute of limitations. The window closed in November 2023.
UN Women's Beijing+30 review. In the United States, the election returns an administration that campaigns against "gender ideology".
Executive orders restrict federal recognition of gender; the United States withdraws from the World Health Organization and dismantles most foreign assistance, including programmes against gender-based violence. To verify against the specific orders and the programme list.
Adopted at CSW69 after difficult negotiations; see the diplomacy timeline above.
Buying sex from 15 to 17 year olds becomes a felony. Senator Myrie's bill to extend the no-force standard to mentally disabled adults passes committee unanimously but lacks an Assembly companion. To verify current status.
Washington DC, Maine, Oregon and Missouri in 2025, Oklahoma in 2026. Thirty-three states still permit it with conditions.
UNODC and UN Women publish the first global estimate. One woman or girl every ten minutes.
This prototype is shown. The ask: a femicide definition in New York law that counts women killed in the sex trade.
Legislative items from the New York State Senate and the sources page. The plan to measure the backlash rather than narrate it, by counting gender and violence-against-women bills and speeches by year, is on the backlog.
Our partner's own record, from its founding to the law New York is being asked to pass. Red marks the New York entries.
The First USA Conference on International Trafficking in Women launches the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.
CATW chairs the caucus at the Fourth World Conference on Women.
The first law to decriminalise prostituted women while holding buyers accountable. CATW supported the Swedish partners.
The Palermo Protocol adopts a comprehensive definition of trafficking, after advocacy by the network CATW organised.
Interviews with 40 women trafficked and prostituted in the United States.
Passes after a joint campaign.
The Swedish model becomes the Nordic Model.
After CATW's Global Campaign for a Sex Trafficking Free Internet.
The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act and New York's Trafficking Victims Protection and Justice Act are signed.
The French Act Against Prostitution, after proceedings CATW Europe began in the early 2000s.
Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2015 enters force.
Websites knowingly facilitating sex trafficking can be held accountable.
A survivor-led alliance of more than 30 advocates and organisations, CATW among them, begins work to bring the Equality Model to New York State.
Developed with survivors and advocates, introduced to the New York State Legislature. Still not passed.
The first US state to adopt the framework, in June 2023.
Reem Alsalem calls on governments to understand the system of prostitution as exploitation and a human rights abuse. The Special Rapporteur Carolina and Yorke met at Apne Aap in October 2026.
Survivors and advocates gather in Paris for a decade of the abolitionist law.
Source: CATW, Legacy of Impact, about page, read 22 October 2026. Selected entries; the full timeline has 36.
A woman killed at thirty in New York loses fifty-one years of life and thirty-five years of work. Move the slider. The figures use the state's median earnings for women working full time and United States life expectancy for women, without discounting or wage growth, so they are conservative.
Earnings: $62,111 median for New York women working full time, year round (American Community Survey 2023, via the NYS Comptroller). Life expectancy: 81.1 years for US women in 2023 (CDC NCHS).
Peterson et al., Lifetime Economic Burden of Intimate Partner Violence Among U.S. Adults, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2018. Peterson et al., Lifetime Economic Burden of Rape Among U.S. Adults, 2017. Hospital and medication costs after rape in New York specifically are on the backlog.
Where governments and development banks have costed violence against women, the figures land between a third of a percent and a tenth of GDP, depending on what is counted. None of these studies is directly comparable with another, and each says its estimate is conservative.
Saldarriaga Jimenez and Kantor, What is the Economic Cost of Violence Against Women?, IDB, 7 October 2026. Maichuhie, Economic toll of GBV: Kenya loses Sh41 billion annually, taskforce finds, Daily Nation, 19 June 2025. The IDB blog notes that most studies exclude femicide itself, intangible costs and long-term effects on children, so every figure here is a floor.
Representation is the other half of the backlash question. The parliament figure is verified against the Inter-Parliamentary Union's 2025 report; the other two are still to be checked against their primary lists.
The strongest evidence that women in office change what government does comes from a natural experiment, not a correlation.
IPU, Women's representation in parliament sees sluggish gains, March 2026. Chattopadhyay and Duflo, Women as Policy Makers, Econometrica 72(5), 2004.
The World Bank has scored every economy's laws on women's economic rights since 1970. The score rose for fifty years, slowed sharply after 2021, and fell by a third when the Bank started measuring whether the laws are actually implemented.
Forced marriage is a form of gender-based violence. Marriage under 18 is not treated as forced in most American states, and the global count of countries that permit it with exceptions is still to be verified.
World Bank, Women, Business and the Law 2023 executive summary and 2024 report. The 19th, Child marriage is still prevalent across the U.S.. UNICEF USA, Help end child marriage. NPR, Will Congress pass a law to make child marriage illegal?