CLAIM: At least 49% of ever-married adolescent girls and women aged 15-49 years have experienced some form of emotional, physical, or sexual violence committed by their current/recent partner.
SOURCE: UNFPA on X (formerly Twitter) account
VERDICT: True
Gender-based violence is defined as violence directed against a person because of that person’s gender or violence that affects persons of a particular gender disproportionately.
Violence against women is understood as a violation of human rights and a form of discrimination against women.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)-Zimbabwe on 26 February 2024 posted a message on its X (formerly Twitter) account @UNFPA_Zimbabwe which partly read: ‘At least 49% of ever-married adolescent girls and women aged 15-49 years have experienced some form of emotional, physical, or sexual violence committed by their current/recent partner.’
The Government of Zimbabwe in partnership with UNFPA launched the Women at the Centre Project in February 2024. The four-year project sponsored by a Japanese pharmaceutical company, Takeda, focuses on providing support to gender-based violence (GBV) survivors.
The 2019 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS), produced by the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZIMSTAT) on Table DV9: Forms of Spousal Violence, indicates that 49.4 percent of ever-married adolescent girls and women aged between 15 and 49 have suffered any form of emotional, physical or sexual violence committed by their current or most recent partners or husbands. According to the same report, physical and sexual violence accounts for 39, 6 percent of the cases while physical violence stands at 37.1 percent.
There is a slight difference in statistics between the MICS and the Zimbabwe 2015 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) on the same phenomenon. The latter puts physical violence against women at 35 percent, sexual (14 percent), and emotional (32 percent).
According to the UNFPA, ‘In Zimbabwe, about 1 in 3 women aged 15 to 49 have experienced physical violence, and about 1 in 4 women have experienced sexual violence, since the age of 15, according to the 2015 Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey.’
The Afro Barometer (2022) Survey titled: ‘Zimbabweans see gender-based violence as most important women’s-rights issue to address,’ says: ‘In Zimbabwe, 40% of women aged 15-49 have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner, including 19% who suffered such violence during the previous 12 months (Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency & UNICEF, 2019).’
Conclusion
The claim: ‘At least 49% of ever-married adolescent girls and women aged 15-49 years have experienced some form of emotional, physical, or sexual violence committed by their current/recent partner,’ has been rated as true, according to the MICS latest report published in 2019 which puts the figure at 49.4%. Minor differences in some earlier studies are a result of separation of statistics of the major forms of violence – physical, sexual and emotional.
