The Lancet Global Health, 2015, 3(6): e302–e303

This year marks 20 years since 189 countries signed the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and committed to prioritisation of women's empowerment and gender equality. Yet a recently released UN analysis shows that violence against women persists at “alarmingly high levels”. Worldwide, one in three women reports sexual or physical violence from a male partner at some point in their lifetime, and such experiences have been linked with harmful effects on health, including maternal morbidity, poor mental health, and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. The UN report also contends that progress towards gender equality has been slow.1 Effective and scalable interventions to reduce intimate partner violence remain scarce, and questions remain about what drives individual violence and why prevalence differs across settings and countries. Lori Heise and Andreas Kotsadam's study in this issue of The Lancet Global Health (#4710), is thus very timely, and is a major advance in the understanding of worldwide intimate partner violence. This analysis of data from 44 countries suggests that gender inequality at the macro-level (ie, country-level) serves as a key driver in women's individual risk of violence and provides insight into why prevalence of intimate partner violence varies across countries. 3Record #4711