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The purpose of this indicator is to measure the percentage of women and girls aged 15 years and older who have experienced sexual violence by persons other than an intimate partner, in the previous 12 months.

Sexual violence is defined as any sort of harmful or unwanted sexual behaviour that is imposed on someone. It includes acts of abusive sexual contact, forced engagement in sexual acts, attempted or completed sexual acts without consent, incest, sexual harassment, etc. Violence against women and girls is one of the most pervasive forms of human rights violations in the world.

Ministry of Human Development

Ministry of Human Development

Quinquennial

Percentage (%)

Evidence has shown that globally, an estimated 7% of women have been sexually assaulted by someone other than a partner at some point in their lives (WHO et al., 2013). Having data on this indicator will help understand the extent and nature of this form of violence and develop appropriate policies and programmes.

According to the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (1993), Violence against Women is any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life. Violence against women shall be understood to encompass, but not be limited to, the following: Physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring in the family.

In addition to age and place of occurrence, income/wealth, education, ethnicity (including indigenous status), disability status, geographic location, relationship with the perpetrator (including sex of perpetrator) and frequency and type of sexual violence (as proxy to severity) are suggested as desired variables for disaggregation for this indicator.

This indicator calls for disaggregation by age group and place of occurrence. No standard definitions and methods have been globally agreed yet to collect data on the place where the violence occurs, therefore this is not presented at this point in the computation method below. Number of women and girls aged 15 years and above who experience sexual violence by persons other than an intimate partner in the previous 12 months divided by the number of women and girls aged 15 years and above in the population multiplied by 100.

This indicator is used to measure the percentage of women and girls aged 15 years and older subjected to sexual violence by persons other than an intimate partner and to halve this percentage by creating policies and strategies geared towards stopping sexual violence against women and children.

1. The availability of comparable data remains a challenge in this area as many data collection efforts have relied on different survey methodologies and used different definitions of sexual violence and different survey question formulation.

2. Willingness to discuss experiences of violence and understanding of relevant concepts may also differ according to the cultural context and this can affect reported prevalence levels.

3. Obtaining data on violence against women and girls is a costly and time-consuming exercise, no matter if they are obtained through stand-alone dedicated surveys or through modules inserted in other surveys.

4. Monitoring this indicator with certain periodicity may be a challenge if sustained capacities are not built and financial resources are not available.

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.