Violence against women, also known as gender-based violence and sexual and gender-based violence is, collectively, violent acts that are primarily or exclusively committed against women and girls. Violence against women are mainly observed in developing and under-developed countries in which the literacy levels are at the lowest.

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violence against women is a wide spread phenomenon. there are a plethora of activists pursuing women's rights especially female activist. sexual abuse, mental torturing, emotional punishments are applied by politicians, husbands, fathers to women without freedom of speech to protest against them . being forced to marry, deprivation of key jobs, underpayments are the representation of violence against half part of population. best

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Violence against women is predominantly experienced as men's coercive control of women (see Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.), involving psychological violence (such as degradation, humiliation, sleep deprivation, withholding the essentials of life, and punishment of the women's children), sexual violence (such as rape or sexual assault), physical violence (such as slapping, hitting, punching and strangling), and financial violence (such as preventing her from accessing money or depriving her or her own money). It can also involve human trafficking and genital mutilation. It is commonly supported by social norms around male dominance and entitlement (see Adams, P., Towns, A., & Gavey, N. (1995) Dominance and entitlement: The rhetoric men use to discuss their violence towards women. Discourse & Society. ) or masculinity (Towns, A. J., & Terry, G. (2014). “You’re in that realm of unpredictability”: Mateship, loyalty and men challenging men who use domestic violence against women. Violence Against Women, 20(8), 1012-1036), which work to silence women's talk of such violence and stop people from intervening (Towns, A. J., & Adams, P. (2016). "I didn't know whether I was right or wrong or just bewildered." Ambiguity, responsibility, and silencing women's talk of men's domestic violence. Violence Against Women, 22(4), 496-520.; Towns, A., Adams, P. J., & Gavey, N. (2003). Silencing talk of men's violence towards women. In L. Theismeyer (Ed.), Discourse and Silencing: Representation and the Language of Displacement (pp. 43-77). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin.). These social norms are also represented in the practices of institutions such as the police, the courts and child protection agencies (e.g. Rigakos, G. S. (1995). Constructing the symbolic complainant: Police subculture and the nonenforcement of protection orders for battered women. Violence and Victims, 10(3), 227-247; Naughton, C. M., O'Donnell, A. T., Greenwood, R. M., & Muldoon, O. T. (2015). 'Ordinary decent domestic violence': A discursive analysis of family law judges' interviews. Discourse & Society, Early online, 1-17. doi:DOI: 10.1177/0957926514564738. Such institutional practices are commonly governmentally supported by gendered laws, which privilege men. Domestic violence is more prevalent in those countries with more discriminatory laws against women. (Heise, L. L., & Kotsadam, A. (2015). Cross-national and multilevel correlates of partner violence:

an analysis of data from population-based surveys. Lancet Global Health, 3, e332-340.)

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Thank you Karen B Silva for your excellent answer. Best regards. Hazim.