What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls Evidence Reviews Paper 1: State of the field of research on violence against women and girls

This is the first in a series of four evidence review papers produced by What Works to Prevent Violence against Women and Girls (hereafter referred to as What Works). What Works is a DFID-funded global programme that is investing an unprecedented £25 million over 5 years for the prevention of VAWG. It supports primary prevention efforts across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, that seek to understand and address the underlying causes of violence, in order to stop it before it starts. This paper outlines our current knowledge base regarding VAWG and identifies where our understanding needs to be expanded in order to deliver the most sophisticated interventions and impact on the prevalence of VAWG globally.

The accompanying summary brief is designed to provide an overview of what we know about intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence and child abuse, based on the literature. It can be used by programmers, policymakers and researchers to inform theories of change for violence prevention interventions.

The complete series includes:

• Paper 1: State of the field of research on violence against women and girls.
• Paper 2: Interventions to prevent violence against women and girls.
• Paper 3: Response mechanisms to prevent violence against women and girls.
• Paper 4: Approaches to scale-up and assessing cost-effectiveness of programmes to preventviolence against women and girls.