Today marks International Women’s Day, in the same week that we also mark the fifth anniversary of the killing of Sarah Everard, a tragic reminder of the progress that still needs to be made in preventing and responding to violence against women and girls.
Violence against women and girls is both a global challenge and an online challenge
Joining The Young Foundation from previous international work advancing the rights of women and girls internationally, I know that prevention of gender-based violence (GBV) is possible, but requires sustained and coordinated action at local, national and international levels.
Violence against women and girls harms millions of people around the world and has wider human, social, and economic consequences including lost time in education or work, and exclusion from decision-making, all the way from household to formal political structures. GBV is also increasingly going online, in the form of digital abuse, trolling, stalking, and other forms of technology-facilitated violence against women and girls.
But it is not inevitable.
What works to prevent gender-based violence
Much has already been done to generate the evidence about ‘What Works’ to prevent violence against women and girls and to establish rigorously-evaluated programmes addressing norms at community level, which have reduced violence by as much as 50% in two to three years.
Nevertheless, a third of women still report experiencing physical or sexual violence worldwide – a figure that holds true across all countries and communities.
We have the ability to eliminate GBV within our lifetime; we now need to make it happen. As the recently established global All in campaign to end GBV affirms, “We know what works. We have the evidence. What’s missing is leadership and action – bold, coordinated and sustained.”
Leadership and collective action to end gender-based violence
As a supporter of this campaign, and with an ‘ambition’ to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, the Westminster government has a clear leadership role in delivering this objective, but it also requires action and participation from all of us.
That’s because preventing violence against women and girls requires listening to survivors and those with lived experience, strengthening community responses, sharing successful strategies, and building coalitions for change. These are approaches that sit at the heart of the work of The Young Foundation, evident in our community research, our peer research and participatory research approaches, and in the social action projects we support. Our work with young people tackling the root causes of, and solutions to youth violence, is just one example – and it has contributed to positive change in youth policy.
Ending violence against women and girls is possible within our lifetime. But it will require leadership, sustained investment and collective action from governments, communities, organisations, and individuals alike.
Civil society Community needs and priorities Criminal justice Inequality Social action Systems change Posted on: 8 March 2026 Authors: Sue Griffiths,