Fifty per cent women in South Asia experience violence in their daily lives.

Sixty per cent women in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, 37 per cent in India, 80 per cent in Pakistan, and 50 per cent in Afghanistan live with daily abuse by their intimate partners within their own homes.

In the region, violence against women is pervasive, critical, and deeply entrenched in the family, community, society and the State, and advancing in intensity and scale.

The result of such discrimination and violence is 50 million ‘missing’ women -- there are now only 94 women for every 100 men in South Asia.

Violence against women goes beyond physical beatings; it is about conditions and situations that systematically deny and devalue women, their lives, health, rights, choices, and power.

It affects every woman’s life in the region even if she herself is not a victim; its evident in every decision she makes – or does not – (within homes, social settings or workplace) be it the mode of dress, behaviour or movement.

It threatens her life, health, rights, choices, power, and the ability to participate in all spheres of life.

Violence against women does not just affect women. It adversely affects each one in society.

There would be 13 million fewer malnourished children in South Asia if women had an equal say in the family, says UNICEF’s The State of World’s Children (2007).

‘We Can’ is making violence against women visible and a public concern. It is undoing the shame and stigma attached to talking about it (particularly domestic violence), and triggering a desire and commitment among ordinary people to change social attitudes and behaviour that support and maintain inequality and violence against women.

It works on the premise that when enough people embark upon a change they can influence and transform the institutions, communities, and society of which they are a part.