2.1. Violence
Violence is a term that has no one clear definition. The concept could be understood in the context of gender, ethnicity, family background, and culture. The World Health Organization (2002) defined that violence is intentionally or unexpectedly causing sexual, physiological and physical harm to people or themselves. Violence could be divided into 3 categories depending on i) who does it and ii) who is harmed, such as self-directed (suicide and self-abuse), interpersonal (community and family, partner) and collective (social, political and economic). And based on these categories, the nature of violence divides four main types: physical, sexual, neglect or deprivation and psychological. Figure 1 shows who is affected by violence.
Figure 1.
The link between categories and nature of violence (Safer spaces, 2021)
Social and cultural standards can affect the use of violence (Perrin, 2019). These standards can prevent and decrease the use of violence on the other hand they can increase the use of it. Some cultures use violence in order to behave like kids or reduce conflicts but it can increase interpersonal conflicts (NCBI, 2018). Cultural and social standards can cause intimate partners violence, suicide and self-harm, sexual, community and youth violence (World Health Organizations, 2009). In some parts of the world, gender-based violence is still increasing because of traditional views and societal acceptance. Additionally, gender-based domestic violence has increased during the lockdown period imposed by the pandemic in many countries. For example, in Uzbekistan reporting of domestic violence (World Bank, 2020) has gone up alongside job losses, economic crises and the majority of men started to verbal, physical and emotional violence to their wives and daughters. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 2020 between January and October, 8430 violent acts against girls and women were recorded and they suffered from emotional and physical abuse (Mantovanelli, 2020).