Consider this, from UNFPA:
In Chile, domestic violence cost women $1.56 billion [USD] in lost earnings in 1996, more than 2 per cent of the country's GDP. In India, one survey showed women lost an average of seven working days after an incident of violence. Domestic violence constitutes the single biggest health risk to Australian women of reproductive age, resulting in economic losses of about $6.3 billion a year. In the United States, the figure adds up to some $12.6 billion annually.
By way of comparison, estimates of the economic cost of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa have ranged (pdf) from 0.6% of GDP for the region to over 1% (equivalent to $12 billion USD a year in 2001). Clearly then the cost of violence against women is significant, whether measured in absolute or relative terms.
As Sylvia Walby has researched this cost of violence against women is not restricted to one government department or one area of society. In addition, the costs to the government as a whole are both direct and indirect (pdf). For example, direct costs include those accruing from direct service provision such as that from the health care and criminal justice systems (including emergency services, hospitals and GPs, and the courts) as survivors access medical treatment for their injuries and perpetrators are brought to justice. Importantly, any measure of these direct costs will only be a fraction of the true costs since reporting rates are so low and many women do not seek medical attention. Indirect costs meanwhile include those cited in the quote above such as loss of productivity and earnings, as well as less tangible variables such as educational achievement and future earning potentials. This is to say nothing of the human and emotional costs, which Walby has demonstrated can also be financially quantified.
One would expect that anything that cost a state 2% of its GDP as in Chile would be prioritised for action. Yet most countries not only do not have any kind of coherent strategy to eliminate violence against women, but if asked would struggle to assess how much they currently spend on tackling even the symptoms of violence against women, never mind the root causes.
The inability to declare how much money is being spent on managing the impacts of violence against women is a result of the way that expenditure is allocated in most countries. For instance, spending that helps women survivors can fall partly within the health department's budget and partly within the criminal justice department's budget. Moreover, the funds that help survivors may not be tagged as ‘violence against women' expenditures but could form part of core service provision for the whole population. This speaks to a fundamental problem in the way that state budgets are developed which gender budgeting initiatives seek to resolve. Indeed, one of the main objectives (pdf) of gender-sensitive budget analysis (pdf) is to be able to track how the allocation of resources impacts differently on women and men. To any country that claims to be prioritizing the elimination of violence against women I say, ‘show me the money.'
Photo by Ahmed Rabea, shared under a Creative Commons license