No Punchline

Gender-based violence, domestic abuse and why it needs to be stopped

- Koyyi Chin

The list of gender-based violence is terrifyingly long. From domestic abuse, economic violence, sexual harassment, sexual assault, rape, coercion, cyber violence, female genital mutilation, honour killing, infanticide, forced unions and child marriages, to human trafficking—these deplorable acts don’t just happen behind closed doors, but in broad daylight as well.

While GBV can happen to anyone, the majority who survive these cases are women and young girls. According to data accrued by the Lancet, ‘more than a third of women and girls—over one billion people— experience intimate partner violence or non-partner physical or sexual violence in their lifetime’. The article also states that though the ‘lifetime prevalence of childhood sexual abuse is unacceptably high for both sexes’, it was still more frequent for girls than boys.

In Malaysia, as tensions rose during the height of Covid-19, so did the cases for GBV and domestic abuse. Based on an article published by The Star, in 2021 alone, a whopping total of 7,468 domestic violence cases were reported to the police—a 42 per cent increase from 2020, which saw 5,260 cases.