Research knowledge base for GBV questions, methods, and service pathways
This is now a research knowledge base rather than a simple FAQ. Search across the published corpus, filter by research lens, and move directly into the source material behind each answer.
Published entries
8
Curated answers grounded in public South African GBV, justice, and support sources.
Visible now
8
The full published knowledge base across every research lens.
Source sets
1
Each answer stays tied to a public source so researchers can verify context.
Use this with place pages
Move from source-backed questions into municipality research
The knowledge base explains the concepts. The municipality pages, rankings, and baseline context show how to apply them in the research workflow.
Read the national baseline
Use the context layer when a question needs national prevalence or methodology framing.
Open our municipal data
Turn research questions into a shortlist of municipalities to inspect more closely.
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Jump straight into place-level pages once you know which municipality you want to study.
Research lenses
Filter the knowledge base the way researchers work
Move between methods, service pathways, risk factors, legal process, survivor support, and data interpretation without losing source traceability.
Methods
Study design, methodology, definitions, and how the evidence was assembled.
Service pathways
How people move through hospitals, police, shelters, courts, and referral systems.
Risk factors
Drivers of violence, vulnerability, exposure, and intersectional risk patterns.
Legal process
Rights, reporting, police procedure, court process, and legal protections.
Survivor support
Healing, counselling, trauma-informed support, and practical care for survivors.
Data interpretation
Limits, caveats, bias, and guidance for reading the evidence responsibly.
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Find by phrase, source, or research lens
Search across questions, answers, and source titles, then narrow the set by knowledge lens or source family.
Research lens
Methods
3 entriesStudy design, methodology, definitions, and how the evidence was assembled.
The strongest top-line figure is that 35.5% of women aged 18 years and older reported experiencing lifetime physical and/or sexual violence. The report presents this as a national baseline for South Africa rather than a local prevalence estimate for a single municipality.
No. This report is a national and subgroup baseline survey. It is strong for national context, benchmarking, and understanding patterns across groups, but it should not be used on its own to assign exact GBV prevalence rates to individual municipalities.
Women with disabilities showed higher lifetime burden on several measures. The report found higher lifetime physical violence, higher lifetime sexual violence, and higher lifetime physical and/or sexual violence among women with disabilities than among women without disabilities.
Research lens
Legal process
5 entriesRights, reporting, police procedure, court process, and legal protections.
The report found that 7.0% of women reported recent physical and/or sexual violence in the past 12 months. This makes the study useful not only for understanding lifetime burden, but also for showing that a substantial level of recent violence is still ongoing.
Among women who disclosed physical and/or sexual IPV, 64.2% told family, 31.1% told friends or neighbours, and only 17.1% told authorities or services. Among formal services, police were the most commonly used, followed by hospitals or health centres, then courts, religious leaders, and social services.
The report shows that help-seeking is pathway-based, not category-based. People often need a mix of police, hospital care, counselling, legal help, and family or community support. That means the site should guide users by need and next step, not only by organisation type.
Users should read it as context for understanding why support services matter, how survivors seek help, and which groups may face higher vulnerability. On NGO Finder, the report works best as a public research layer that complements local service coverage data rather than replacing it.
The study points to overlapping drivers such as childhood exposure to violence, poor mental health, harmful gender norms, controlling behaviour, substance use, food insecurity, and economic vulnerability. It argues for a structural and life-course view rather than treating GBV as only an individual issue.