of gender-based violence are beyond the scope of this paper, but this section will present a summary classification of the types of costs and the methodologies that can be used to measure them. Regardless of the relative socioeconomic costs of gender-based violence, gender-based based violence remains a women’s health issue and a violation of human rights, but cost estimates can facilitate the “dimensioning” of the issue: how does gender-based violence compare to the panoply of pressing development issues? What are the impacts of gender-based violence on a country’s socioeconomic development?

The most common approach used to calculate the costs of gender-based violence has been an “accounting methodology”, in which costs are calculated for specific categories, and total cost to society is simply the sum of all distinct categories of costs. Typical of this approach is CDC (2003), which specifies two types of costs:

- _Direct costs_ are actual expenditures related to gender-based violence, including health care services, judicial services and social services.

- _Indirect costs_ represent the value of lost productivity from both paid work and unpaid work, as well as the foregone value of lifetime earnings for women who have died.

Recent estimates of the health care costs of intimate partner violence against adult women in the United States found costs of over 4 billion dollars in 1995, including both mental health and medical care costs (CDC, 2003). Similar methodologies have been employed to generate estimates for Canada (Greaves et al., 1995), British Columbia (Kerr and McLean, 1996), Holland (Korf et al., 1997), Northern Territory (Office of Women ́s Policy, 1996), Queensland (Blumel et al., 1993), Switzerland (Godenzi and Yodanis, 1998) and the U.K. (Stanko et al., 1998). To the best of our knowledge, there are only two such direct cost studies for gender-based violence in developing countries. Mansingh and Ramphal (1993) estimated that the direct costs of treating victims of intimate partner violence in Kingston Public Hospital (Jamaica) totaled U.S. $454,000 in 1991 (in 2001 dollars). Sanchez et. al. (2004) found that the Colombian national government spent approximately 184 billion pesos (U.S. $73.7 million) in 2003 to prevent, detect and offer services to survivors of family violence-an amount equal to approximately 0.6% of the total national budget.

Direct cost estimates are problematic in developing country contexts, where the lack of services (or serious under-funding of services) generally means that direct cost estimates associated with gender-based violence will be low, giving a mistaken impression that that the problem is not important. In such settings, indirect cost estimates may be more useful than direct cost estimates. Indirect cost estimates have typically focused on foregone earnings due to death and lost productivity (CDC, 2003), job loss, lost productivity of women victims, lost productivity of abusers due to incarceration, and mortality (Laurence and Spalter-Roth, 1995); loss of tax revenues due to death and incarceration (Greaves et al., 1995), and decreases in women’s earnings (Morrison and Orlando, 1999; Sánchez et al., 2004). For example, Morrison and Orlando (1999) estimated that lost wages due to family violence amounted to 1.6 and 2.0% of GDP in Nicaragua and Chile, respectively, by estimating earnings equations of the determinants of women’s earnings. Using a non-parametric matching methodology to analyze DHS data from 1995, Sánchez et al. (2004) found that Colombian women who suffered physical violence had 14% lower earnings than women who did not suffer violence. Using more recent data from 2003, they estimated that the wage loss due to family violence was equivalent to 0.85% of GDP in 2003.

One weakness of the accounting approach is that any list of categories is essentially arbitrary, and alternative categorizations can always be devised (Buvinic and Morrison, 1999). An even more serious weakness is that key categories of costs can be inadvertently left out of the calculations. For example, the indirect cost category mentioned above focuses on productivity and earnings losses of female survivors, but does not discuss the impact that witnessing or being a victim of family violence may have on children. These impacts may include: poorer performance in school (Larraín et al., 1997); increased probability of delinquency, both as a juvenile and as an adult (Windom, 1989; Dahlberg, 1998; Thornberry et al., 2001); 13