Every 90 Seconds

Violence against women reaches far beyond the people directly involved. Anne P. DePrince shows how it is bound up with the subjects that most often divide public debate, including access to healthcare and education, immigration, gun laws, economic security, and criminal justice reform. These are matters that touch nearly everyone, almost every day.

The scale of the problem is stark. Every 90 seconds, a woman is sexually assaulted, and during that same span another woman is abused by a current or former partner. Every sixteen hours, an intimate partner kills a woman with a gun. Close to one in five women is stalked, and one in sixteen is raped during her first sexual experience. Even with these figures, many of us tend to regard such violence as a matter for someone else.

DePrince contends that ending this violence requires a different way of thinking about it, one that drops the assumption that only abusers and their victims have a stake. She traces how the issue connects to wider concerns. When a woman needs emergency treatment after violence or abuse, an already strained healthcare system absorbs a cost that could have been prevented. Violence also helps drive families to flee to safety far from home, adding pressure at the U.S. southern border, and it feeds widespread poverty, which weighs on the national economy.

Across these examples, DePrince argues that the interconnections themselves create an opening. Because the problem overlaps with so many issues people already care about, ordinary citizens can be drawn into efforts to end violence against women in new ways, and progress on it can advance those other goals too.