A review of gender-based violence and the emerging combating policies.

Abstract

Background: Gender-based violence (GBV) occupies a large segment in the contemporary reproductive health spectrum and it is of immense public health importance. There has been upsurge in GBV with the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic; thus making formulating and implementing combating policies an emergency.

Objective: To review the pattern of GBV in COVID-19 pandemic and the emerging preventive policies.

Materials: Thorough electronic search of published articles on GBV and GBV-related issues, published between 1979 and 2021, was conducted through pubmed, Cochrane libraries, Google search engine and semantic scholar. This was also accompanied by advanced search using Boolean operators to make the search more focused. The search was however restricted to only articles written in the English language.

Conclusion: Gender-based violence in women remains a huge pandemic socio-medical burden especially with the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. Multisectoral health promotion interventions are a critical means of bridging the various gaps at the various levels of prevention. Sustained collaborative research is desirable in order to have a deeper insight to the cause-effect nature of all the variants of GBV.