Gender-based violence is often discussed through a very specific lens: violence against women and girls, particularly violence committed by men against women. There is a strong reason for that focus. The global evidence shows that women experience extremely high levels of intimate-partner and sexual violence, and that violence has serious physical, psychological and social consequences. But acknowledging that reality should not require us to pretend that violence has only one gender of victim, or that men are relevant only as perpetrators.
A more complete conversation about gender-based violence has to be capable of holding two facts at the same time: women face substantial gender-specific violence, and men and boys experience enormous levels of violence as well. The global data are considerably more complicated than the public conversation sometimes suggests.
The World Health Organization’s latest global estimates indicate that almost one in three women worldwide — approximately 840 million women and girls — have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate-partner violence or non-partner sexual violence during their lifetime. In the previous 12 months alone, an estimated 316 million women experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner. These are enormous numbers, and there is no sensible argument for minimizing them.
But that is not the entirety of the world’s violence problem.
When we move from the specific category of violence against women to intentional homicide as a whole, the gender distribution changes dramatically. UNODC’s global homicide data show that men and boys constitute the overwhelming majority of homicide victims. In 2021, men accounted for approximately 81% of intentional homicide victims worldwide, compared with about 19% for women. The global male homicide rate was approximately 9.3 per 100,000 men, compared with about 2.3 per 100,000 women.
The most recent UNODC figures continue to show the same broad pattern. In 2022, there were an estimated 359,300 male homicide victims globally, compared with approximately 88,400 female homicide victims.
That is an important statistic because it tells us something that is sometimes missing from conversations about violence: being male does not make someone insulated from violence. In terms of lethal violence, being male is actually associated with substantially greater risk.
This does not contradict the evidence on violence against women. The two statistics are measuring different things.
A woman being beaten by an intimate partner is violence. A man being killed in a street robbery is violence. A woman being sexually assaulted is violence. A man being attacked by another man is violence. A woman being murdered by a partner can constitute femicide where the killing meets the relevant gender-related criteria. A man being murdered by another man is still homicide, and the fact that it does not carry the same gender-specific terminology does not make the death less real or less significant.
This is where the language around GBV becomes important.
Gender-based violence is not simply a synonym for “men hurting women.” The UN definition of violence against women focuses specifically on violence directed at women because they are women or violence that disproportionately affects women. But gender and violence can interact in different ways, including through the expectations and social roles imposed on men and boys. Men can also be victims of intimate-partner violence, sexual violence, coercion and other forms of abuse.
The difficulty is that global data on male victimization are not nearly as comprehensive as the data collected on violence against women. That creates a genuine measurement problem. The absence of a comparable statistic does not necessarily mean the absence of the problem.
There is also a major distinction between violence occurring inside intimate or family relationships and violence occurring in the wider community.
This distinction is particularly important when homicide statistics are discussed.
UNODC’s 2023 data show that approximately 60% of female homicide victims were killed by intimate partners or family members, compared with about 12% of male homicide victims. In other words, women face a much greater relative risk of being killed within the private sphere, while men account for the overwhelming majority of homicide victims overall and are more commonly killed outside the home.
Both realities matter.
A woman who is murdered by her partner is not simply another homicide statistic. The circumstances surrounding the killing can reveal a pattern of coercion, domestic violence, control and gender-related violence. That is precisely why researchers and international organisations have developed specific frameworks for measuring femicide or gender-related killings of women and girls.
At the same time, a man murdered in a violent confrontation, robbery, organised crime incident or other form of community violence is not simply an abstract “crime statistic.” He is also a victim of violence, and the extraordinary concentration of homicide among men is itself a gendered phenomenon that deserves attention.
This is one of the uncomfortable truths about violence: men are disproportionately represented among both perpetrators and victims of lethal violence.
UNODC reported that approximately 90% of people brought into formal contact with police for intentional homicide in 2021 were men. At the same time, men constituted 81% of homicide victims.
That creates a complicated picture. Men are overwhelmingly represented among those who commit lethal violence, but they are also overwhelmingly represented among those who die from it.
Reducing that reality to “men are violent” misses half of the equation.
The question should instead be: what circumstances are producing such high levels of violence among men, particularly young men?
UNODC’s research identifies young men as particularly vulnerable to lethal violence, including violence associated with organised crime and gangs. In the Americas, for example, young men aged 15–29 had an estimated homicide rate of 53.6 per 100,000 in 2021, more than five times the global male homicide rate.
This is not an argument against focusing on violence against women. It is an argument for understanding violence more completely.
There is another problem when the conversation becomes exclusively about men as perpetrators: it can unintentionally make male victims less visible.
A man experiencing domestic violence may hesitate to report it because he expects ridicule, disbelief or the assumption that he should simply be able to defend himself. A boy experiencing sexual abuse may be less likely to be recognised as a victim. A man suffering psychological abuse from a partner may not even recognise what is happening as abuse because the cultural expectation is that men should be able to withstand it.
The global data themselves acknowledge gaps in understanding these experiences. UNODC has noted that the paucity of data documenting sexual violence against boys has contributed to the erroneous perception that such abuse is relatively infrequent. Its global SDG progress reporting also notes that men experience physical violence more than women, while women are disproportionately affected by sexual violence.
That is a far more useful way of understanding the problem than trying to determine which gender “suffers more.”
Because the answer depends on what kind of violence we are talking about.
If we are talking about intimate-partner and sexual violence against women, the global evidence shows an enormous burden affecting women. If we are talking about homicide, men constitute the vast majority of victims. If we are talking about killings within the home by intimate partners or family members, women are disproportionately represented. If we are talking about homicide outside the domestic sphere, men are disproportionately represented.
There is no contradiction in these findings.
The mistake is expecting one statistic to explain the entire phenomenon of violence.
This is also why the term femicide needs to be used carefully. Femicide is not simply another word for a woman who has been murdered. The UN statistical framework treats gender-related killing as a specific category because the circumstances and motivations surrounding the killing matter. In 2023, UN Women and UNODC estimated that approximately 85,000 women and girls were intentionally killed globally, of whom about 51,100 were killed by intimate partners or family members.
Those numbers are devastating, and they deserve serious attention.
But they should not be presented as though they represent the entirety of gendered lethal violence in the world.
The same global homicide data show that roughly four out of every five homicide victims are male. That means any serious discussion about violence and gender has to ask why men and boys are so disproportionately exposed to lethal violence, why young men are particularly vulnerable, why male victims can be reluctant to seek help, and what social conditions repeatedly place men in violent environments.
None of this requires vilifying women. And it does not require vilifying men either.
In fact, vilification is probably one of the least useful ways to approach a problem as complex as violence.
Saying “men are the problem” collapses millions of different men into a single category and tells us almost nothing about why violence happens. Equally, saying “women are responsible for domestic violence too” without acknowledging the substantial evidence concerning violence against women simply creates another distortion.
The objective should not be to create a competition between male and female suffering.
A murdered man is not less important because more women experience a particular type of violence. A woman assaulted by her partner is not less deserving of protection because more men die from homicide. A boy who is sexually abused does not become less of a victim because international data on sexual violence are dominated by female victims.
Violence should be opposed because it harms people, while the gender dimensions of that violence should be understood because they help explain how and why it happens.
That is ultimately what the global numbers are telling us.
Women experience an enormous burden of intimate-partner and sexual violence. Men experience an enormous burden of lethal and physical violence. Women are disproportionately exposed to killings within intimate and family settings, while men are overwhelmingly represented among homicide victims outside those settings. And both men and women can experience violence within relationships.
The conversation becomes stronger, not weaker, when all of those realities are acknowledged.
The goal should not be to replace a conversation about violence against women with a conversation about violence against men.
It should be to stop treating violence as though it has only one victim, one perpetrator, or one explanation.
If we genuinely want to reduce GBV and violence more broadly, we need prevention, reporting systems, support services and public conversations that recognise victims regardless of sex — while still recognising that different forms of violence affect men and women differently.
Because the opposite of gender-based violence is not gender-based blame. It is a society in which violence is understood properly, victims are taken seriously, and nobody is considered disposable because of their sex.
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