What 39 Studies Reveal About Stopping Violence Against Women in Spanish-Speaking Countries

More than one in three women worldwide will experience gender-based violence in her lifetime, a statistic that has stubbornly resisted decades of global attention, treaties, and development goals. Now, a sweeping scoping review published in the Journal of Population Research has taken stock of what is actually being done on the ground across the Spanish-speaking world, and the picture it paints is both encouraging and sobering. Researchers Patricia J. Kelly, Nancy Rudner, and Basil H. Aboul-Enein systematically combed nine academic databases covering the years 2000 through December 2025, hunting for intervention studies aimed at preventing violence against women and girls in Spanish-speaking sovereign states. What they found was a body of 39 studies spread across eight countries, a corpus large enough to reveal patterns yet thin enough to expose how much work remains undone.

The scale of the problem these interventions confront is difficult to overstate. The United Nations has identified gender equity and the elimination of violence against females as central pillars of sustainable development, and the World Health Organization’s prevalence estimates show that physical or sexual intimate partner violence touches women on every continent. Spanish-speaking countries are extraordinarily diverse, spanning wealthy European economies and lower- and middle-income nations across Latin America and the Caribbean, yet the review’s authors note that gender inequality remains prevalent across the region and that gender-based violence constitutes a major public health problem regardless of a country’s economic standing. Femicide, dating violence among adolescents, abuse during pregnancy, and violence linked to problem drinking all appear in the literature the team examined, underscoring that this is not a single phenomenon but a family of harms woven through intimate relationships, schools, clinics, prisons, and entire communities.

Methodologically, the review is a model of transparency. The researchers applied the PICOS framework, a structured approach that spells out Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes, and Study design criteria, to decide which studies made the cut. They searched nine academic databases, screened records with the Rayyan web and mobile application built for systematic reviews, and followed updated methodological guidance for scoping reviews along with the PRISMA-ScR reporting checklist. Once the eligible studies were assembled, the team tabulated the characteristics of each intervention and its reported outcomes, then classified every program by its level of prevention. That classification is where the review’s most striking structural finding emerges: of the 39 studies, 14 focused on primary prevention, stopping violence before it ever begins; 6 addressed secondary prevention, responding to early warning signs and at-risk situations; and 19, nearly half, concentrated on tertiary prevention, working with people already affected by violence.

That heavy tilt toward tertiary prevention tells a story in itself. Most of the effort documented in the literature goes into repairing damage after it has occurred, through programs for incarcerated offenders, shelters for survivors, and treatment for women already experiencing abuse. The review catalogues a remarkable range of such tertiary work, including psychological treatment programs for men convicted of gender-based violence in Spanish prisons, community rehabilitation programs for convicted intimate partner violence offenders, and the Contexto Programme, a batterer intervention program whose success indicators and recidivism risk reduction have been assessed in multiple studies. In the Dominican Republic, researchers conducted a process evaluation of a community-based domestic violence perpetrator program and even published a brief report comparing recidivists with non-recidivists who attended it. These are the kinds of programs that operate in the criminal justice system’s shadow, and their results, as the review notes, were more nuanced than those of earlier-stage interventions.

The primary and secondary prevention studies, by contrast, delivered uniformly positive findings, a pattern that should make policymakers sit up. School-based programs feature prominently. In Mexico City, the True Love program, a school-based initiative to reduce dating violence among adolescents, was evaluated in a study published in Prevention Science, while another Mexican educational workshop targeting dating violence among college students showed measurable effects. In Colombia, a prevention program for gender-based intimate partner violence was tested at a primary school and reported in Frontiers in Psychology. Spanish researchers evaluated an online program for the prevention of dating violence in a mixed pre-test and post-test study, and a quasi-experimental study examined an integrative school-based intervention on child protection against violence. A participatory educational intervention delved into teen dating violence, gender, and health assets using a mixed methods evaluation, and another comparative quasi-experimental study tested an educational intervention designed to decrease adolescents’ justification of dating violence, attacking the attitudes that normalize abuse before they harden into behavior.

Health systems emerge as another critical front. A cluster randomized controlled trial in Mexico City tested a nurse-delivered, clinic-based intervention to address intimate partner violence among low-income women, one of the more methodologically robust studies in the entire review. In Lima, Peru, a pilot intervention program targeted intimate partner violence during pregnancy, a period when abuse can endanger two lives at once. A nested cohort intervention study spanning Denmark and Spain, the STOP Study, tested video consultations and a safety app for pregnant women exposed to intimate partner violence, showing how digital health tools can reach women who might never walk into a shelter. In Honduras, an evaluation examined an intimate partner violence training program for teachers and health professionals, betting on community leaders as multipliers of prevention. Training programs for healthcare professionals in domestic violence have a long evidence base, and studies from Spain examined how educational interventions changed health sciences students’ perceptions of obstetric violence and how dramatized video problems improved postgraduate nurses’ management of gender violence.

Community-based and culturally tailored approaches round out the portfolio. In Panama, researchers applied participatory processes to develop culturally appropriate educational materials on domestic violence prevention with Ngäbe-Buglé women, an approach grounded in community-based participatory research methods that treat communities as partners rather than audiences. A community-based strategy for preventing gender-based violence among people living in vulnerable conditions was implemented in Seville, Spain. In Bolivia, lessons were drawn from implementing Program P, a parenting program designed to prevent family violence. In Peru, a pilot program whose name translates roughly as ‘the one who sees and helps’ was evaluated for gender-based violence prevention, and in Mexico, a cognitive-behavioral intervention sought to empower women abused by spouses with drinking problems. Technology also appears in the mix, with researchers designing and testing the acceptability of a psychosocial text messaging intervention for victims of gender-based violence, and a training program aimed at young lawbreakers targeted gender-based cyber violence specifically.

Yet for all this activity, the review’s methodological audit is blunt. Many of the 39 studies relied on limited sample sizes or lacked comparison groups altogether, making it hard to know whether observed changes were caused by the interventions or by something else. Follow-up assessments were often short or missing, so the durability of any positive effects remains largely unknown. Only seven of the studies used a theoretical framework or model, a strikingly small proportion given that behavioral science theory is widely regarded as essential for designing and implementing effective public health interventions. Without an explicit theory of change, programs risk being a collection of activities rather than a coherent strategy, and without rigorous evaluation designs, even a genuinely effective program cannot prove itself or be scaled with confidence. The authors also flag a deeper gap: research-based literature on gender-based violence in Spanish-language dominant countries is limited overall, and further research is very much needed.

The review’s central conclusion is that successfully addressing gender-based violence demands a variety of approaches, working in schools and community settings as well as in shelters for women experiencing violence and in criminal justice settings with men incarcerated for it. No single lever pulls hard enough. The encouraging news is that every primary and secondary prevention study in the review reported some positive findings, suggesting that the field’s upstream tools, from classroom curricula to clinic-based screening to community leader training, are pointing in the right direction. The sobering news is that tertiary interventions, the ones dealing with the deepest and most dangerous cases, produced more nuanced results, and that the evidence base as a whole is built on fragile methodological foundations. For a region where gender inequality remains entrenched and where the United Nations’ sustainable development goals have made eliminating violence against women an explicit target, the message is clear: the interventions exist, many of them work at least in the short term, but the science of proving and perfecting them is still running well behind the scale of the problem.

What happens next will depend on whether funders and researchers treat this evidence gap as urgently as the violence itself. The review’s authors, affiliated with institutions including Thomas Jefferson University, the Medical University of South Carolina, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, have produced a map of where the field stands. Turning that map into progress will require larger samples, comparison groups, longer follow-up, and theoretically grounded program design, applied across the full spectrum of prevention. Until then, the women and girls of the Spanish-speaking world are counting on interventions whose promise is real but whose proof, in too many cases, is still being written.

Subject of Research: Preventive interventions to reduce gender-based violence against women and girls in Spanish-speaking countries

Article Title: Reducing violence against women and girls across Spanish-speaking sovereign states: a scoping review of preventive interventions

Article References: Reducing violence against women and girls across Spanish-speaking sovereign states: a scoping review of preventive interventions. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12546-026-09441-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12546-026-09441-1

Keywords: gender-based violence, scoping review, Spanish-speaking countries, intimate partner violence, primary prevention, tertiary prevention, dating violence, public health, Latin America, perpetrator programs, school-based interventions, women's health