Summary

Women's insecurity is a problem around the world and affects women of all ages and socio-economic backgrounds. Even if the street is often thought to be the place where women are most at risk, the least safe place for women and their children remains within the home.

Violence has numerous effects of on women's physical and mental health as well as important impacts on a country's economy in terms of socio-economic and human costs such as to the health system, police, legal system, social services, drug and alcohol addictions, lowered productivity, mortality, etc.

In Costa Rica, individualized intervention for 19,230 women up until 2001 revealed the magnitude and complexity of the problem of violence against women. This brought women's groups to bring the problem to public attention and to demand that measures be taken so that violence against women would not only be recognized as a public health issue but would also be condemned by courts of justice.

The «Plan for attention and prevention of family violence» was developed following the Beijing conference on women. It involved a series of measures: a law for the promotion of women's social equality, an office for the defense of women's rights (Defensoría de la mujer), a law against domestic violence, a law against sexual harassment in places of work and learning, and Municipal women's offices at the local level. Other parallel intervention strategies were also developed: local prevention networks, escort services for women, shelters, community police, 1-800 telephone help lines, and a legislative assembly on domestic and partner violence.

The key challenge remains to improve the efficiency and «human» quality of services with a greater focus on prevention. Violence against women must be addressed comprehensively as a larger structural problem related to unequal relations between women and men.