Energy Poverty and Gendered Violence

Executive Summary

Introduction

Energy poverty is not gender-neutral, yet it remains absent from the Istanbul Convention, Europe’s most comprehensive legal framework for combating violence against women and domestic violence. This report argues that limited access to affordable, reliable energy compounds the structural conditions that enable gender-based violence: it deepens women’s economic dependence, worsens their physical and mental health, and can trap them in abusive relationships when leaving would mean losing access to heating, lighting, or cooking facilities. Drawing on EU data showing energy poverty rates nearly doubling since 2021, alongside academic research linking economic hardship and environmental stressors to intimate partner violence, the report analyzes the Istanbul Convention chapter by chapter through a gender-and-energy lens. It identifies specific articles, spanning prevention, protection and support, compensation, risk assessment, and migration and asylum, where energy poverty operates as an unrecognized aggravating factor, and proposes concrete amendments to Articles 6, 18, 20, 23, 51, 59, and 60. Six accompanying policy recommendations call for recognizing energy poverty as a gendered risk, collecting gender-disaggregated energy data, guaranteeing energy access within support services, training frontline professionals, enforcing EU-wide compliance, and protecting migrant and asylum-seeking women. The report concludes that energy poverty functions as a silent enabler of gender-based violence, and that integrating energy justice into the Convention is essential to fully realizing its protective mandate. 

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