Violence Against Women And Girls: The Human Rights Crisis We Are Failing In 2025
By Aneeta Prem
“They said I was the shame.”
The girl who told me that was not living under a dictatorship far away. She was living in a British city, in a family who said she had destroyed their honour because she did not want to marry the man they had chosen. Her body, her future and her safety were treated as bargaining chips.
Another young woman sat in front of me years later and said, almost apologetically, “He told me he had the right to decide if I lived or died.” He was her husband. By the time anyone listened, she had been strangled, beaten, humiliated, tracked on her phone and cut off from everyone she loved. The bruises faded. The idea that her life was negotiable stayed.
These are not rare stories. They run through almost everything I see.
Everywhere you look in 2025, violence against women and girls sits at the centre of the human rights crisis. War, forced displacement, authoritarian politics, artificial intelligence and organised crime all land hardest on women and girls. They are hurt first, helped last and spoken about least.
The World Health Organization now estimates that nearly one in three women, about 840 million globally, have been subjected to intimate partner or sexual violence during their lives. In the last twelve months alone, an estimated 316 million women have been abused by a partner. Progress in reducing this has been painfully slow, with only a tiny yearly decline over more than twenty years.
A joint femicide brief from United Nations agencies estimates that around fifty thousand women and girls were killed in 2024 by intimate partners or family members. That is roughly one killing every ten minutes.
If any other group were being killed by relatives at that rate, the world would treat it as a security emergency. When it happens to women and girls, it is still treated as background noise.
Violence against women and girls is not a side issue. It is the crisis that shows whether human rights are real or just decoration. If half the world cannot walk home, speak online or say no without fear of violence, then human rights are failing at their first job.
Almost one in three women worldwide has been subjected to partner or sexual violence, and that figure has barely shifted since the year 2000. The decline is measured in fractions of a percentage point.
The femicide figures expose the lethal tip of this violence. Around fifty thousand women and girls were killed in 2024 by partners or family members, which works out at one every ten minutes.
These killings do not appear out of a clear blue sky. They grow out of years of acts that are minimised or dismissed: checking a girl’s phone, refusing to let her see friends, deciding what she can wear, blocking her from school, forcing her into a marriage she did not choose, threatening her if she tries to leave. When professionals do not recognise that pattern, they also fail to recognise how close she is to lethal danger.
Law and policy prefer tidy categories. Domestic abuse. Forced marriage. Female genital mutilation. So called honour based abuse. Trafficking. Rape. Online abuse. Each has its own acronym and its own guidance.
The girls and women I meet do not live in those boxes.
A child may be cut at three and told it is to keep her pure. As a teenager she may be promised to a cousin abroad. Her schooling goes, her passport goes, her choices go. She may be raped within that marriage, beaten if she resists, threatened with death if she leaves. If she runs, she may be tracked via her phone, harassed online, accused of bringing shame on her family.
To her, this is one long chain of punishment and control. Agencies often see only fragments: a concern logged in primary school, a missing child report, an A and E attendance, an online abuse complaint. Because no one joins the dots, no one sees the full picture early enough.
The Crown Prosecution Service has just launched a five year Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy that finally starts to acknowledge this overlap. New CPS analysis shows that a large majority of stalking, harassment and image based abuse prosecutions sit inside a wider pattern of domestic abuse, and that so called honour based cases almost never stand alone. The strategy promises specific training on honour based abuse, forced marriage, FGM, stalking and cyberstalking, as well as a stalking action plan and national scrutiny panels.
For those of us who have sat with survivors for years, this is welcome, but it should not have taken this long.
Language has helped hide the problem. When families justify abuse in the name of “honour”, and institutions repeat the term “honour based abuse”, blame slides quietly onto the girl. It suggests she has done something to deserve what is happening to her.
At Freedom Charity, the survivors we work with have been very clear. They do not want the word honour attached to what was done to them. One young woman said to me, “There was nothing honourable about being beaten and married off. Call it what it is. It is dishonour.”
That is why, working alongside survivors through Freedom Charity, we talk about dishonour abuse. The wording matters. It says that the only person bringing dishonour on a family, a community or a faith is the person who chooses violence. Not the child who asks for help. Survivors led that shift in language and our charity followed, not the other way round.
If the home and the street used to be the most dangerous places, the phone is now the third.
Online abuse, deepfake pornography, non consensual sharing of intimate images and coordinated harassment are now routine tools used against women and girls. UN Women has warned that digital violence is one of the fastest growing forms of abuse worldwide, while nearly half of women and girls still live in countries with no clear legal protection from online abuse.
A recent study in the United Kingdom, commissioned by the Office of the Police Chief Scientific Adviser and carried out by Crest Advisory, found that one in four people felt there was nothing wrong with, or felt neutral about, creating sexual deepfakes even when the person depicted had not consented. About seven per cent of those surveyed said they had already been victims of intimate deepfakes, and only around half had reported it. Shame, fear of not being believed and a belief that nothing would change were common reasons for staying silent.
I see the human cost of those attitudes. Girls who stop going to school because fake sexual images of them are circulating in class group chats. Women who shut down careers because every time they speak, a wave of rape threats and doctored images follows.
The law in the UK is beginning to catch up. Creating sexual deepfakes without consent is now a criminal offence, and regulators have started to push platforms harder on misogynistic content and online harms.
Abusive content still stays up too long. Reporting routes are complex. Platforms profit from engagement driven by outrage and hate. Survivors are still told to block abusers, change accounts or leave social media altogether, as if the answer were for women and girls to disappear quietly from public spaces.
Telling a fifteen year old girl to delete her apps because men are sharing fake sexual images of her is not safeguarding. It is abandonment.
On paper, the legal framework has never looked stronger. There are international treaties on discrimination against women. In Europe, there is the Istanbul Convention on violence and domestic abuse. In the UK, we have specific offences for forced marriage, FGM, controlling or coercive behaviour and intimate image abuse.
Yet United Nations experts continue to warn that many survivors cannot access even the basics: legal aid, safe housing, trauma informed healthcare, forensic examinations, reliable interpreters and independent advocates. A recent paper from UN women’s rights mechanisms linked budget cuts directly to shrinking access to justice, legal aid, shelters and medical services for victims of sex and gender based crimes.
In England and Wales, the Bar Council has warned that legal aid deserts and strict means tests are shutting many domestic abuse survivors out of the family courts.
Even where specialist services do exist, I hear the same two sentences again and again.
“They said they were sorry, but nothing really happened.”
“I wish I had never told anyone.”
That is not what safety and justice are meant to feel like.
If governments meant what they say about ending violence against women and girls, the landscape would look very different.
We would name and measure the problem honestly. Official statistics would not scatter forced marriage, FGM, so called honour crimes, trafficking, rape and online abuse into separate piles. They would track how often they happen together to the same person. Laws and guidance would stop borrowing the language of “honour” from perpetrators, and terms like dishonour abuse, developed with survivors, would be used to place responsibility where it belongs.
We would fund specialist services as essential national infrastructure. Refuges, advocacy services, helplines, counselling, safe housing and legal aid would have secure, long term funding. Survivor led and women led organisations, including those rooted in migrant and minority communities, would be treated as key partners rather than low cost subcontractors.
We would treat digital and AI driven abuse as real violence. Platforms would have clear legal duties to prevent, detect and remove deepfakes, image based abuse, cyberstalking and coordinated harassment. Police, prosecutors and judges would be trained to understand digital evidence and the way online threats connect to offline harm. Schools and youth services would teach consent, coercive control and digital safety as part of core safeguarding, not as one assembly in November.
We would build accountability instead of relying on awareness days. States would implement the recommendations of UN treaty bodies and the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, and report publicly on progress. Strategic cases, public inquiries and independent reviews would expose patterns so that change does not rest on individual survivors carrying the whole burden.
People often ask me whether I feel hopeful. I do, in one sense. I have seen change in my lifetime. Forced marriage is now a specific crime in England and Wales. There are FGM protection orders, better school guidance and clearer duties on professionals. None of that happened by accident. It happened because survivors spoke and refused to be silenced, and because campaigners and allies would not let the issue drop.
Hope is not the same as comfort. The latest figures show that the world has spent more than two decades crawling forward at a pace that still leaves hundreds of millions of women living with violence, and tens of thousands being killed by people who know them.
Violence against women and girls is not a side chapter in the human rights story. It is the exam paper that tells us whether the whole system works.
Right now, we are failing that exam. The knowledge is there. The law is mostly there. What is missing is the political will to act as if every one of those women and girls mattered as much as anyone else.
The question is not whether we know enough. We do.
The question is whether we care enough to treat this as the central human rights crisis of our time, and to act accordingly.
Sources
The Gambia’s Supreme Court is hearing a case that could weaken the ban on FGM. This clear explainer shows why it matters for child protection worldwide.
When families watch, follow and report: the hidden stalking dynamic behind forced marriage and dishonour abuse
How AI nudification is turning everyday photos into a new form of sexual abuse against children Two strong alternatives, depending on outlet tone: How AI nudification apps are normalising sexual abuse and putting children at risk
Capacity, Consent and Dishonour Abuse: Why “no capacity means no consent” is the safeguard the world is still failing to apply
Female genital mutilation in the UK: what we don’t say out loud. Female genital mutilation is not “a problem elsewhere”. It is child abuse happening in the UK and worldwide, and girls need us to name it.
Balochistan Child Marriages Restraint Act 2025 Provincial law: minimum marriage age 18. Cognisable, non-bailable, non-compoundable offences. Forced marriage is child abuse. The shame lies with the perpetrator, not the child.