Intimate partner violence: are we ready for action?

577 EDITORIAL Documenting, quantifying, intervening in and preventing interpersonal violence is a leading global public health challenge of this decade. Apart from HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria – where violence arguably plays an exacerbating role – what other disease process claims more than half a million lives annually, generating a burden of 'approximately 1400 deaths a day, the equivalent of three long-haul commercial aircraft crashing every single day'? 2 Yet even death may not be the most sensitive measure of the profound impact of interpersonal violence on the lives of individuals, communities, societies, nations, regions and our very humanity. With interpersonal violence occurring anywhere that humans function, both publicly and privately – at home, at work, in the streets, markets and cinemas, and on the battlefield – this social problem poses an increasing threat to the quality of our lives and the planet. The urgency of confronting this issue cannot be clearer. In this month's SAMJ two articles address intimate partner violence (IPV), 3,4 a subset of interpersonal violence that primarily targets women, is deeply rooted in the gendered nature of human relationships, and is largely perceived as invisible to public scrutiny. They are a welcome addition to the gender-based violence literature. Their themes expand our knowledge and understanding of this complex and vexing health and human rights issue and should also galvanise us into action. Abrahams and colleagues 3 provide compelling evidence to support continued gun control efforts in this country. They synthesised data from six South African studies to examine the use of firearms by intimate partners to kill, rape, maim and intimidate women, as well as turn such weapons on themselves in acts of murder-suicide. Calculating the rate for intimate femicide (women killed at the hands of their current or former husbands, boyfriends or lovers) with a firearm, using data from a 1999 national retrospective homicide study (the year before Parliament passed the Firearms Control Act (2000) and several years before its full implementation), the authors establish a deadly baseline. Nearly 31% of women who died from gunshot injuries were killed by their intimate partners. In South Africa, where every 6 hours a woman is killed by her intimate partner, 5 it is not surprising that the population rate of 'females shot and killed by their intimate partners … is higher than the overall USA rate of females killed by shooting [i.e. all-gun mortality, not just at the …