Violence Against Women: Just A Women's Affair?

Background Violence against women (VAW) is a wide phenomenon registered across centuries, in different cultural contexts and in different geographical areas. Since 1948, thanks to the Universal Declaration of human rights, VAW is recognized as a form of encroachment of human rights. Just at the beginning of the '90s although, this problem arises in the international political and social panorama. In 1994, the “Declaration of the elimination of violence against women” gave a definition of VAW, promoting legal interventions and suggesting how to prevent it. The international literature resulted influenced as well by this issue, with a boosting in the number of dedicated manuscripts in the last 30-year period. Objective Quantify the weight and the trends of the worldwide literature on the issue: “Violence Against Women”. Methods A retrospective observational study through a bibliometric analysis was performed. 46 data-banks were analysed using the search engine SilverPlatter Winspirs. For each database a search history was performed to retrieve all the manuscripts containing the key-words “violence”, “women” and the quoted phrase “violence against women” published during the interval period 1800-2005. On “VAW” manuscripts information on title, author/s, affiliation, source, journal, publication year, language and abstract was collected and recorded in a dedicated database. A descriptive analysis was carried out. The articles containing “VAW” were described according to the discipline of the publishing journal the trend, the language of publication and the country of affiliation. Results: According to the keywords chosen, the search retrieved 1,370,295 manuscripts for Women, 130,493 for Violence and 3,460 for the quoted phrase VAW, less than 0.07‰ of the whole international literature published since 1800. The databanks with at least one manuscript containing the quoted phrase “VAW” are 24, “Mental measurement yearbook” classed first with 0.89 ‰, followed by “PsychINFO” with 0.69 ‰ and by “Int'l Pol Sci Abs” (International Political Science Abstracts) with 0.39 ‰. The quoted phrase appears in 1976; afterwards a progressive increase is evident from the ’90s, with a first peak in the 1994-1995 period and a second one in 2001-2002. The articles are distributed according to disciplines: Women and Gender studies (49%), Clinical Medicine (13%, 5% of which belongs to Obstetrics and Gynaecology), Psychology and Psychiatry (12%), Sociology and Anthropology (9%), Law (7%), Public Health (3.3%). 94% of manuscripts are written in English (the remaining 6% is variously distributed, mainly French and Spanish papers are at stake). The most productive researchers on VAW seem to come from the US (more than 85%), followed by Europeans and Canadians, with about a 10% of articles each; the manuscripts production respectively of Asians, Africans, South and Central Americans and Australians is lower than 5%. The mean value of number of pages per article is 10.2, i.e. a total weight 352.7 lb. of paper to print all published knowledge. Conclusion The proliferation of articles related to “violence against women” shows an increase with the beginning of the ’90s, following the growing international, political and social interest for it. The “weight” of the articles in the total amount of literature is 352.7 lb, a relatively small weight considering the heavy impact it imposes on health of women and the whole society. Journals specialised on “women’s world” (basically the dedicated one “Violence Against Women) show the greatest interest on this topic, and journals belonging to psychological/psychiatric and sociological disciplines follow. VAW seems still to be a limited theme for few experts. Moreover, despite the consequences on health VAW has shown, VAW seem to be neglected by public health.