based violence: intimate partner violence (physical and sexual) and sexual violence by any perpetrator. As a result, this review will not provide a comprehensive discussion of interventions that address other types of gender-based violence, such as female genital mutilation, dowry deaths, or rape used as a weapon of war.

## **_Methods used to compile this review_**

This review draws from many published and unpublished sources, using databases such as POPLINE, PUBMED and CURRENT CONTENTS. Many program evaluations from middle and low-income countries appear only in the grey or unpublished literature, so this review relies heavily on unpublished sources, often cited secondhand. Many national and international organizations have produced reviews of gender-based violence initiatives in recent years. These reviews often focus on a single sector, such as health, education or communication, and they sometimes place a greater emphasis on describing program strategies than on synthesizing what is known about effective prevention. This paper benefited greatly from their work, especially from reviews of unpublished evaluations by USAID (Guedes, 2004; White, Green and Murphy, 2003), the Panos Institute (Mirsky, 2003), the World Health Organization (Krug et al., 2002), and the Inter-American Development Bank (Morrison and Biehl, 1999).

# **JUSTICE**

## **Background**

Legal systems throughout the world have historically encoded discrimination against women into penal and civil law. In many low and middle-income countries, penal codes do not criminalize certain kinds of physical or sexual violence against women; consider sexual violence to be a private offense against “family honor” rather than a criminal offense against the personal integrity of a woman; allow perpetrators of rape to evade criminal responsibility by agreeing to marry their victim; involve criminal procedures that make conviction unlikely; and sometimes punish victims of sexual violence by prosecuting them for adultery or abortion (Mehotra, 1998; Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, 2002). Even when strong legislation exists, law enforcement institutions often fail to enforce the law, and/or inflict additional trauma on survivors of violence through bias and mistreatment (Human Rights Watch, 1997). In many countries, women have limited rights to voluntary marriage, divorce, child custody, and child support, either by law or in practice-legal tools that can allow women to avoid or escape abusive situations and may be essential before they can consider seeking help from law enforcement.

Research suggests several ways in which justice sector reform could contribute to gender-based violence prevention, for example by sanctioning those who perpetrate crimes against women; by increasing awareness throughout society that physical or sexual violence against women is a crime; by increasing women’s access to the legal system; and by reducing mistreatment of women by law enforcement institutions themselves. Empirical evidence of a causal link between criminal justice and prevention is somewhat weak, however. While Counts, Brown, and Campbell (1992) found that the lowest rates of violence against women occurred in societies that consistently imposed sanctions (including legal sanctions) on perpetrators among 16 societies studied (both developed and developing), some researchers question whether criminal justice approaches can deter violence (Gillegan, 2000). Even in countries such as the United States and Australia that have measured declines in rates of intimate partner and sexual violence over the past decade (Rennison, 2003; Dunne et al., 2003), researchers have not been able to determine whether these declines are due to legal reforms, demographic shifts, social and cultural changes, or other factors-assuming the trends themselves are correctly identified.

Criminal justice approaches to violence against women have inherent limitations. Even within strong legal systems, prosecution is often lengthy, complicated, expensive, traumatic for survivors, and is not 17