[Costs of intimate partner violence against women. A systematic review]

About one in four women in Germany have experienced intimate partner violence at some point in their lives. Intimate partner violence against women is associated with a wide range of acute and long-term physical and psychological health problems. Partner violence also incurs huge costs to healthcare services, social care and the legal system with a subsequent loss in economic productivity. This systematic review will present existing studies on cost estimations with a particular focus on the types of costs and methodological problems in the studies which will provide information for the development of future surveys estimating the costs of partner violence. Electronic databases were searched in addition to manual searches. The database search for identification of such studies was only partially successful because administrative reports predominated. A total of nine cost estimates were identified which fulfilled the inclusion criteria and three studies considered direct, indirect and intangible costs. Due to the fragmentary data there is considerable heterogeneity in the cost categories and it can be assumed that the real costs are higher than those found in the studies. For reasons of international comparability, future data collection should be based on standard indicators which still need to be formulated.