Measuring Pain, Missing Justice: Time to Move from Data to Action on GBV

By Norman Muvavarirwa
In Zimbabwe, gender-based violence is not just a topic for advocacy meetings or court queues it is something the country keeps measuring, and the data keeps confirming.
The United Nations defines gender-based violence as any act that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm, including threats, coercion, and arbitrary deprivation of liberty.
In Zimbabwe, women from different backgrounds report that harm is persistent, woven into the realities of relationships and community life.
Recent Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey findings show that 27% of women have experienced physical violence since the age of 15, while 13% report physical violence within the past 18 months.

Those figures matter because they place violence in two-time frames at once, a lifetime reality and an ongoing one. It is not only what happened before there is evidence of what continues now.
The survey results also suggest that the society has not decisively shifted away from violence. Women’s reports of physical violence since age 15 have fluctuated, but they have not fallen away.
In 2005–06, 36% of women aged 15–49 reported ever experiencing physical violence; the figure was 30% in 2010–11; 35% in 2015; and 27% in 2023–24.
The movement across years can be read as improvement for some groups and periods, but the broader picture is more troubling: violence remains common enough to keep returning in new survey cycles.
Age patterns further underline how GBV can become concentrated around particular life stages. Among women, reported physical violence since age 15 drops to 15% for those aged 15–19, then rises sharply to a peak of 34% among women aged 25–29, before decreasing among women aged 30 and older.
In practical terms, the data suggests that risk is shaped by life circumstances such as relationship dynamics, financial dependence, and negotiation of power within households rather than being evenly spread across society.
The location adds another factor to consider. The physical violence since age 15 varies by province, reaching 38% in Matabeleland North, while predominantly urban provinces such as Harare and Bulawayo report lower prevalence.
For residents in Harare, the temptation might be to treat the highest numbers as someone else’s problem, but the pattern points to the way local contexts economic conditions, norms, access to support systems, and reporting practices can shape violence and how it is measured.

The data also shows that violence is not confined to public spaces or stranger danger narratives. It extends into intimate relationships and is connected to how households interpret control, conflict, and authority. In 2023–24, 3% of women reported committing physical violence against a husband or intimate partner, up from 2% in both 2010–11 and 2015.
Even more telling is that the proportion of women who have ever committed physical violence against a husband/partner has stayed at 4% since 2010–11, implying that certain social scripts around violence endure even as specific recent figures change.
For nearly twenty years, Pamhidzai Mashongwe 44 of Gokwe shared a bed, a kitchen, and a surname with a man who once stood in front of a classroom shaping young minds. Today, she shares only bruises, silence, and a terrifying thought: that death might be kinder than staying.
Her husband was a respected primary school teacher until his health failed. Then came retirement. Then came the shouting. Then came the fists.
“Now, there is no peace in my home,” says Mashongwe , her voice trembling from a corner of Gokwe where help rarely arrives. “He curses me. He beats me. He says I am embarrassing him. But he is the one who is sick inside he never wanted to stop working. Now he thinks I am the cause of all his trouble.”
Mrs Mashongwe is not a rare case. She is a statistic with a heartbeat.
New data from the Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey confirms that 27% of women have experienced physical violence since the age of 15. For women between the ages of 25 and 29, that number jumps to 34%. In Matabeleland North, it reaches a staggering 38%.
And yet, Zimbabwe has laws. The Domestic Violence Act. The Cyber and Data Protection Act. A fresh National Gender Policy. International promises like CEDAW and the Maputo Protocol sit on shelves collecting dust next to court files that never get opened.
“The country has strong laws to promote gender equality,” says award-winning gender journalist Lazarus Sauti. “Nevertheless, putting these laws into practice still faces major challenges.”
For Mashongwe, those “challenges” have a name: poverty, isolation, and a failing mind. She has no money to see a counselor or return to her relatives. She cannot sleep. She has stopped dreaming. And recently, she started thinking about killing herself just to stop the next beating.
“I see that I am trapped,” she says. “Going to the courts or the police feels like a dream.”
Across Zimbabwe, the data tells the same painful story. Violence has not fallen dramatically in nearly two decades. It has simply moved through different ages, provinces, and relationships—proving that old beliefs, gender stereotypes, and weak accountability are still alive.
As gender activist Daphne Jena puts it, “Laws alone do not remove inequality.”
“So the question hanging over Gokwe and every province from Harare to Bulawayo is no longer whether Zimbabwe knows how to stop gender-based violence. The question is whether the country finally has the will to do more than just measure it,” retorted Jena.
Zimbabwe has positioned gender-based violence as a matter of rights, not just policy. Domestically, the Domestic Violence Act (2007) was designed to prevent and mitigate household violence, while online GBV is addressed through the Cyber and Data Protection Act (Chapter 12:07).
The National Gender Policy (2023–2030) frames GBV as a major obstacle to women’s participation in political, economic and social life.
Daphne Jena a gender activist with a local NGO noted that many women in Zimbabwe already know from daily life that laws alone do not remove inequality.
“Old beliefs, gender stereotypes, political tension, discrimination, weak protection, and poor accountability still make many women vulnerable, especially those who face more than one kind of disadvantage at the same time,” noted Jena.
Zimbabwe’s challenge, captured in these statistics, is not simply to respond after violence occurs.
The data story is that violence persists across age groups, provinces, and relationship contexts an indication that the country is still confronting the everyday structures that allow gender-based violence to survive.