Exploring what lies beneath the tip of the gender-based violence iceberg

Abstract

Gender-based violence refers to violence directed against a person because of that person's gender or violence that affects persons of a particular gender disproportionately. It is estimated that 30% of women worldwide have suffered either physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime. Primary Health Care could be one of the ideal places for the detection of these situations, but most of the cases remain undetected as the victims often decline to seek for medical care after suffering an event. This work shows that public primary health care system in Catalonia might be registering only around 50% of the cases currently, and it will take more than 20 years to see the whole picture of the phenomenon, and the situation could be the same in countries with similar socioeconomic contexts. We found in previous studies that gender-based violence cases are severely underregistered from the public health and judicial perspectives, on the basis of qualitative analyses and survey data. Furthermore, we propose a statistical modelling approach able to estimate the actual burden of this issue accurately. Our results show that awareness training campaigns focused on primary healthcare professionals are very effective in reducing the underreporting issue but should be conducted repeatedly and not only once.