Tackling Violence against Women: From Knowledge to Practical

Over the decades, approaches to estimating the costs of interpersonal
violence have been developed (see Box 5). This also includes estimates of
the cost of VAw. In fact, one of the great achievements of the research on
VAw is the measuring of the direct and indirect economic costs of VAw to
victims, their families, their communities, and their national societies and
economies. The ‘costing’ of VAw, ongoing now for approximately 20 years,
started as small sample surveys or case studies, and then moved into the
rough mapping of national costs and the development of high-quality, small
data sets to measure specific costs. 16
Most estimates to determine the costs of VAw use an accounting approach,
in which costs are divided into direct tangibles (hospital bills), indirect
tangibles (loss of income from the inability to work), and direct intangibles
(pain and suffering of the victim). Indirect intangible costs (the psychological
harm to children who witness violence) would also fit the model and are
discussed in the literature, but have rarely been included in an actual study
(Day, Mckenna, and Bowlus, 2005). The ‘state of the art’ today constitutes
the use of increasingly sophisticated data sources combined with experimentation
with new estimation techniques. 17
Box 5 Approaches to estimating the costs of violence 18
The accounting approach is essentially a balance sheet of the accumulated costs
of specific factors to the economy. whether determined from a macro or micro
perspective, it requires reliable data and the ability to identify appropriate cost
factors associated with fatal and non-fatal injury rates. This is the principal
methodology applied by public health economists associated with the world
Health Organisation (wHO) and other agencies (gD Secretariat, 2008b, pp. 91–92).
Economists studying war commonly adopt a modelling approach to measuring
the economic costs of collective armed violence. They estimate the costs of
armed conflict by undertaking growth simulations in countries affected by
civil wars. Such estimates should take account of the social and geographic
concentration of the effects of war (particularly among the poor); the opportunity
costs of development; the persistence of the economic costs of war over
time; and spillover effects, such as crime, disease, and terrorism.
The contingent valuation approach, or ‘willingness-to-pay’ approach, is also
commonly employed to estimate the costs of armed violence. This technique
measures what individuals and households are prepared to pay in order to
improve their safety from, or live free of the threat of, violence.
Source: gD Secretariat (2008b, pp. 91–92)
23
FiVE PossiBlE iNiTiATiVEs To Fill REsEARcH GAPs
i
ii