RESPECT Women: Preventing Violence

Preventing violence cannot mean asking women to identify danger, state boundaries and manage conflict more skillfully on their own. WHO’s RESPECT women: Preventing violence against women, second edition, places relationships, economic conditions, public services and social norms within one intervention framework. The 2025 edition updates the evidence and adds humanitarian settings. Its central shift concerns responsibility: safety requires changing the conditions that enable violence, rather than relying on women’s ability to change themselves.

The seven strategies cover relationship skills, women’s empowerment, services, poverty reduction, safe environments, prevention of child and adolescent abuse, and transformed attitudes and norms. These are connected conditions rather than seven separate boxes to tick. Equal negotiation within a household needs income, usable services and community opposition to violence. Without them, a language of communication problems can disguise one person controlling another. The relationship-skills example explicitly concerns couples without violence; it should not become an instruction that survivors repair abusive relationships.

Resources need changes in power

The framework uses Tanzania’s MAISHA programme to illustrate microfinance combined with social empowerment training. What matters is more than money entering a household: who controls resources, who makes decisions and whether violence remains acceptable. Money can alter the conditions of choice without automatically abolishing domination. Community mobilization similarly aims beyond teaching everyone to speak kindly. It challenges rules that sustain male privilege, women’s subordination and the stigmatization of survivors.

Services are not merely a repair after prevention fails. Health, legal and social support and safe spaces shape whether women can leave danger, seek help without losing a livelihood, or obtain assistance without being forced into a particular legal response. The framework requires coordinated, survivor-centered services and includes participation, confidentiality and anticipation of backlash in its principles. Opening an institution without addressing the costs of using it can return responsibility for safety to the individual.

An evidence table is not a guarantee

The methods section identifies three systematic reviews behind the update, two concerning humanitarian settings. The intervention table distinguishes promising approaches, those needing more evidence, conflicting results, interventions not rigorously evaluated and those showing no reduction in violence. It also distinguishes income settings and humanitarian contexts. Absence of evidence does not simply mean ineffectiveness; success in one evaluation does not mean copying a programme’s name elsewhere will reproduce its results. The table supports comparison rather than universal approval.

The theory of change and evaluation sections separate outputs, interim changes and long-term impact. Workshop attendance or greater agreement with gender equality cannot stand in for reduced violence. Expansion needs fidelity to rights and safety alongside adaptation of language, resources and local partnerships. A useful question follows from its funding and partnership principles: if scale is measured only in people reached, are women’s organizations supplying knowledge without receiving durable support?

The humanitarian perspective also resists treating crisis as a background that erases differences. Displacement, interrupted services and weakened justice can make existing control harder to escape. The framework calls attention to disabled, Indigenous and trans women and adolescent girls, among others. It is a policy tool, not proof that all groups face identical risks or that every measure has been evaluated locally. Implementation still requires the judgment of affected people and continuing monitoring.

CEDAW General Recommendation No. 35 offers a normative comparison about state responsibility and remedies, while RESPECT asks how prevention can be designed and change assessed. Naila Kabeer’s study of resources, agency and achievements distinguishes possessing resources from being able to choose. Together they sharpen an evaluative question: does a change increase women’s ability to determine their lives and reduce violence, rather than simply leave a programme with more records?