For 20 years, I have studied and analyzed conflict patterns. The worst of what I have encountered always concerns women and their experience in conflict. The effects are not limited to the proportion of women of all recorded fatalities: At least 147,000 people were killed across violent conflicts in 2023, and women constituted a large number, but not majority, of those deaths. More men are killed in violent conflicts, but more women are exposed to the repeated assaults and enduring destruction of conflict.
A Global Tapestry of Suffering
In the DR Congo’s Kivu region, widows and mothers recount heartbreakingly resigned tales of sexual violence, home burnings, the murders of their husbands, and the shattering of their children’s future. Women held in Mexican prisons who face persistent rape by both prison officials and other inmates. In Colombia, a female journalist was violated and tortured by the state for reporting on paramilitaries. Haiti presents another grim picture, where over 77% of the population faces direct exposure to conflict and where there is a rampant epidemic of gang rapes. In Nigeria, the kidnapping of girls by militias remains a widespread horror, highlighted by the infamous Chibok incident and more recently, the abduction of six sisters near Abuja. And let’s not forget the women and girls in Afghanistan, who, numbering over 9 million, were directly exposed to violence in 2021 and remain in perpetual isolation.
None of this is new. In post-World War II Berlin, women would ask each other “Wie oft?” (How often?) — meaning, “How often were you raped by Russian soldiers?” Of the 2 million German women who were raped, 10% died, mostly by suicide. Across conflicts, nuns, young girls, older women, pregnant women, and mothers are violated without pity. We collectively acknowledge that “war has long been fought through the bodies of women and girls” and the relentless forms of torture and misery experienced by women is often through sexual assaults. It isn’t hidden, but no one is punished for torturing these women, few are ever brought to justice for killing them or their families, and women are left to rebuild themselves, families, communities, and futures.
The Gendered Cost of War
War’s toll is profound, typically quantified by death and injury of fighters and civilians alike. While women do die and, on rare occasions, fight in wars, death tallies obscure the true impact of conflict, especially on women. Fatality tolls are inherently gendered as an assessment of the cost of violence, and there are extensive limitations on accurate reporting of other costs.
Separate from death counts, the number of events in which women are directly targeted is still quite small, often comprising less than 2% of all reported violence events in conflict. This isn’t because women are less targeted, but because collecting evidence is so difficult — even in very well-covered conflicts. Aggregated fatality information is already highly suspect, and accurate gendered fatality information is non-existent.
If we try to make women’s role in war about deaths, we will constantly be running after a horrendous target and falling short: More men than women are killed in conflict. Seeking additional and thorough reporting on conflict sexual violations is notoriously difficult due to access constraints and social stigma. This means that the gendered impact of conflict events is close to impossible to reliably track.
Redefining Response and Recognition
To accurately capture the experiences of women in conflict, we must look beyond traditional metrics. More women than men are exposed to conflict in some of the most violent places in the world (e.g., Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Papua New Guinea, India, Philippines, Niger, Yemen, Iran, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Central America, Mali, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Chad). A largely equal share (412 million women and 411 million men) are exposed across the top 50 most violent places in 2021-2022.
These 412 million women and girls living in harm’s way are not just sometimes killed, but also suffer from other desperate features of conflict: sexual violence, loss of family members, destruction of homes and communities, lack of safe refuge, livelihood loss, underrepresentation in decision-making, opportunities to seek safety, access to public services for them and their children, food insecurity and starvation, a lack of health facilities, the danger of living with repeated assaults, and so on.
They suffer most in conflicts that are largely unseen: Women’s rate of exposure to conflict in Yemen, Nigeria, and India is higher than men’s, and women also face more forms of harm in those countries. Women and girls are subject to levels of immediate and long-term brutality, despite these conflicts receiving far less attention and humanitarian response than those in Ukraine and Gaza, where fatality numbers have dominated reporting. There are many more conflicts around the world than get attention, and women are especially subject to their harms. But we must look to the conflicts outside of wars to tell us the full story of women in conflict.
In turn, there is a growing need for attention to conflicts based on their impacts, not their death total, and for policies and practices to center the unseen aspects of conflict’s burden. To further understand the specific challenges women face in conflict, ACLED established a dedicated research hub focused on political violence targeting women. This resource offers crucial insights and data to support the protection and security of women globally. Civilian conflict deaths are tragic and far too frequent, but let us not forget the many who are left to live in destroyed communities and societies. We have less accurate information about those survivors and the immediate and longer-term harms they face. Seeing the reality for women and girls exposed to conflict is the first step toward helping.
