United Nations General Assembly A/RES/58/185 Distr.: General 18 March 2004 Fifty-eighth session Agenda item 117 (b) Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 22 December 2003 [on the report of the Third Committee (A/58/508/Add.2)] 58/185. In-depth study on all forms of violence against women The General Assembly, Affirming that the term “violence against women” means any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life, Requests the Secretary-General: (a) To conduct an in-depth study, from existing available resources and, if necessary, supplemented by voluntary contributions, on all forms and manifestations of violence against women, as identified in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women 1 and the outcome of the twenty-third special session of the General Assembly entitled “Women 2000: gender equality, development and peace for the twenty-first century”, 2 and relevant documents, disaggregated by type of violence, and based on research undertaken and data collected at the national, regional and international levels, in particular in the following fields: (i) A statistical overview on all forms of violence against women, in order to better evaluate the scale of such violence, while identifying gaps in data collection and formulating proposals for assessing the extent of the problem; (ii) The causes of violence against women, including its root causes and other contributing factors; (iii) The medium and long-term consequences of violence against women; (iv) The health, social and economic costs of violence against women; (v) The identification of best practice examples in areas including legislation, policies, programmes and effective remedies, and the efficiency of such mechanisms to the end of combating and eliminating violence against women; _______________ 1 Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, 4–15 September 1995 (United Nations publication, Sales No. E.96.IV.13), chap. I, resolution 1, annexes I and II. 2 Resolution S-23/2, annex, and resolution S-23/3, annex. 03 50568