Violence against women (VAW), also known as gender-based violence (GBV), Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) or sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), is violence primarily committed by men or boys against women or girls. Such violence is often considered hate crime, committed against persons specifically because they are of the female gender, and can take many forms. Violence against men is the corresponding category, where acts of violence are targeted against the male gender.

VAW has an extensive history, though the incidents and intensity of violence has varied over time and between societies. Such violence is often seen as a mechanism for the subjugation of women, whether in society in general or in an interpersonal relationship.

The UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women states, "violence against women is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women" and "violence against women is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men."

Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, declared in a 2006 report posted on the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) website:

Violence against women and girls is a problem of pandemic proportions. At least one out of every three women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime with the abuser usually someone known to her.

International instruments aiming to eliminate violence against women and domestic violence have been enacted by various international bodies. These generally start with a definition of gendered violence, and a proposal to combat it. The Istanbul Convention (Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence) of the Council of Europe describes VAW as "a violation of human rights and a form of discrimination against women" and defines VAW as "all acts of gender-based violence that result in or are likely to result in physical, sexual, psychological, or economic harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life".

The 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) of the United Nations General Assembly makes recommendations relating to VAW, and the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action mentions VAW. However, the 1993 United Nations General Assembly resolution on the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women was the first international instrument to explicitly define VAW and elaborate on the subject. Other definitions of VAW are set out in the 1994 Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence Against Women and by the 2003 Maputo Protocol.

In addition, the term gender-based violence refers to "any acts or threats of acts intended to hurt or make women suffer physically, sexually, or psychologically, and which affect women because they are women or affect women disproportionately". Gender-based violence is often used interchangeably with violence against women, and some articles on VAW reiterate these conceptions by stating that men are the main perpetrators of this violence. Moreover, the definition stated by the 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women also supported the notion that violence is rooted in the inequality between men and women when the term violence is used together with the term gender-based.