Violence against women (VAW) is a human rights violation, with often devastating immediate and long-term consequences. Women around the world experience it in various forms, settings, levels of frequency and severity, at the hands of intimate partners, family members or others. In addition, women's feelings of insecurity restrict their lives in myriad ways, hampering their health, as well as their civil, political, economic and social rights. Women's safety is the gateway to basic health, living standards and empowerment, and a necessary condition to achieve gender equality.Widespread stay-at-home orders to curb the spread of COVID-19 potentially locked women down with their abusers, creating dangerous conditions for violence against women, often with tragic consequences. Using administrative data from police, violence against women hotlines, and other service-providers, and analysing big data from online searches and social media posts, UN Women research' has found that violence against women and girls has intensifed since the outbreak of COVID-19. This coincided in many countries with a reduction in services to support survivors, partly due to operational challenges and reduced funding for law enforcement agencies and local women's organizations, which play an essential role in VAW service -provision.2 This has led to several calls to end violence against women, including by United Nations' Secretary-General Antonio Guterres3 and UN Women's former Executive Director, who coined the term the "shadow pandemic".As a result, UN Women has mounted a multifaceted response to address this shadow pandemic.5 This has involved working with local governments, justice, police and health sectors as well as civil society and grass- roots women's organizations to ensure safe public spaces for women and girls during the crisis and to strengthen the capacities of front-line service-providers, shelters and helplines. UN Women has supported mass media and social media sensitization on COVID-19- related VAW increases, and ways to prevent it, including through positive masculinities, and equitable sharing of household responsibilities. UN Women has provided training and technical support, developed research and policy advice and disseminated relevant guidelines and recommendations on VAW responses amid the pandemic. This includes support on applying gender-responsive budgeting across COVID-19 support and recovery and fiscal responses. UN Women has been working with governments and partners to ensure that measures to address violence against women and girls are included in COVID-19 response and recovery efforts at country, regional and global levels, as well as issuing various public recommendations. According to the UN Women-UNDP COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker, launched in 2020, more than half (853 of the 1,605 gender-sensitive measures introduced by countries) have focused on addressing violence against women in particulars.