A/HRC/17/26 inequalities; and analyzing social and/or economic hierarchies among women, and between women and men, i.e. both intra- and inter-gender. B. Forms, causes and consequences 21. It has been acknowledged that violence results from a complex interplay of individual, family, community and social factors, and that, even though all women are at risk of violence in every society in the world, not all women are equally vulnerable to acts and structures of violence. Representing both the universality and the particularity of women’s risk of violence requires the social location and bodily attributes of individuals and groups to be explicitly accounted for. 22. Social location refers to the different positions occupied by individual women that give rise to intra-gender differences among women. Factors such as geographic location, level of education, employment situation, household size, marital relationships, and access to political and civic participation, all impact women’s vulnerability to violence. Further contributory factors for risk of violence include individual aspects of women’s bodily attributes such as race, skin colour, intellectual and physical abilities, age, language skills and fluency, ethnic identity and sexual orientation. 23. Also, one has to situate the experience of the abuse within the given cultural context of each woman’s location and her understanding of the impact of the abuse on her life. Not all women experience similar acts of violence similarly; therefore it is necessary to consider how a woman’s response to any act of violence will be impacted by services and assistance that are offered to remedy harmful consequences. 1. Forms 24. Two broad categories of violence against women are interpersonal, on the one hand, and institutional and structural, on the other, with synergies and linkages between them. No form of interpersonal violence against women is devoid of structural violence – as in all places, such abuse is underpinned by beliefs about the perpetrator’s right to harm another, based on societal notions of gender and rights. 25. Interpersonal violence includes such forms of abuse as economic, psychological, sexual, emotional, physical and verbal threats and actions. These forms of violence are prevalent in all societies, though experienced and understood within distinct societal responses and world views. Such forms of violence are well known and understood and will not be elaborated on in this report. 26. Institutional and structural violence is any form of structural inequality or institutional discrimination that maintains a woman in a subordinate position, whether physical or ideological, to other people within her family, household or community. In many contexts, there are discriminatory measures in place that maintain gender stratification that privileges male power and control, and which disadvantages some women in particular ways. Gender ideologies that dictate that men should control women or allow for men to physically control their partners or children are forms of gender-based structural violence. Therefore, when a woman is abused by a husband because he believes he has the right to physically assault her, the woman is experiencing interpersonal and structural violence simultaneously. 27. Institutional and structural forms of violence include laws and policies that maintain one group’s advantage over another in places of employment, and in terms of educational opportunities, access to resources, forms and places of worship, protection by the police and other State forces, and Government services and benefits. Additionally, an absence of 8