Annotation:
This working paper from the Geneva Declaration Secretariat supports work on the elimination of violence against women (VAW) in armed conflicts. In order to achieve a measurable reduction in the global burden of armed violence, researchers need to fill knowledge gaps in accounting for its gendered dimensions. To this end, the paper identifies key initiatives that researchers can undertake. These include 1) mapping VAW in different forms over time (changes in patterns, prevalence, and frequency); 2) standardizing the data collection to make cross-national comparisons possible; and 3)enhancing costing tools to estimate the financial and other negative impacts of VAW on development, which will enable a cost/benefit approach to evaluating programming. This last initiative will support more contextually adequate policy making, and in turn facilitate a more systematic approach to strategic analysis of programming.