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Not all women face equal risk: Racism, ableism, and more shape exposure to violence and access to justice.

Economic dependence traps victims in violent dynamics, and it more strongly impacts marginalized women.

Behavioral science offers practical tools that can translate evidence into real-world change.

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is one of the most pervasive human rights challenges of our time. Globally, an estimated one in three women will experience physical or sexual violence in her lifetime (World Health Organization, 2021). But that statistic, staggering as it is, obscures a crucial truth: That violence does not strike equally. Racism, classism, ableism, and more intersect with sexism to create profoundly different levels of risk for women and profoundly different barriers to safety. Ending VAWG requires not only understanding how minds, communities, and institutions work but also understanding whose minds, whose communities, and which institutions bear the heaviest burden.

4 Insights From Psychology

1. Violence is an intersectional problem.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational work on intersectionality established that sexism does not operate in isolation, but intersects with oppressions based on race, disability, class, and sexual orientation to produce distinct challenges and lived experiences. Decades of research have borne this out in the context of VAWG. A 2023 systematic review found that women with disabilities face elevated rates of intimate partner violence across every form: physical, sexual, psychological, and financial (García-Cuéllar et al., 2023). They also encounter compounding barriers to help-seeking, including physical dependence on their abusers and institutional disbelief (García-Cuéllar et al., 2023).

A 2024 nationally representative U.S. survey found that LGBT women were twice as likely as non-LGBT women to report recent intimate partner violence (KFF, 2024). Black and Indigenous women face additional risks rooted in structural racism, including the hypersexualization of their bodies, racial bias in legal proceedings, and what researchers have called “intersectional invisibility”: the systematic erasure of their victimization from media narratives and policy agendas (Wallace et al., 2024; Essue et al., 2025). Any framework that treats “women” as a monolithic category will systematically underserve those facing the greatest........

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