This study of gender based insecurity in Addis Ababa found that women and girls are vulnerable in public and private spaces at any time to assault and harassment, though they are at greater risk for physical violence, including rape, at night. They sacrifice time, money, education, socializing, and their mental health to mitigate the risks they face moving around their community and the city.
Overall, men commit almost all of the violence described by participants. Much of the insecurity is blamed on unemployed young men that abuse drugs and alcohol. Some also linked unemployment with massive migration from other areas of the country to Addis Ababa. Two cultural factors seem to inform violence against women. First, society normalizes men and boys touching and saying inappropriate things to women and girls, which then leads to increasingly violent forms of abuse. Additionally, limited police response to gender-based violence creates a culture of impunity, which furthers a cultural acceptance of violence against women. Several strategies that draw from participant coping strategies and an analysis of the sources of insecurity can be explored and are detailed at the end of this report.
This formative research seeks to determine the experiences, sources and effects of GBV and GBI among the urban extreme poor of Dhaka, Bangladesh; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with the goal of informing the development of a pilot survey instrument to measure the prevalence and impact of GBI in selected urban slums of the same three cities.