Research has found women in the Marshall Islands are seeking legal protection against abusive partners at a significantly lower rate than in other Pacific island countries.
The new research found that despite a reported high number of domestic violence cases in the relatively small Micronesian state, very few women have elected to pursue a resolution through the justice system.
However, there has been a slight rise in the number of civil petitions filed by Marshallese women throughout 2025 that sought temporary protection orders. Last year ended with an increase to six petitions filed by women seeking protection, including two in December alone, amid 42,000 residents in the country. This followed an all-time low in 2024 when just one single domestic violence case was brought by a woman into its High Court for a protection order, according to the Department of Justice.
The trend over several recent years was well below the number of petitions filed by women facing domestic violence with the High Court dating back to the mid-2010s.
Information from the past decade indicates that in the three-year period from 2016 through to 2018, as many as 40 women brought forward motions to the High Court towards seeking temporary protection orders against violent partners. But the most recent three years since 2023 had witnessed just 16 women - 60 per cent down on what was recorded in the period seven years earlier.
The drop in High Court petitions from women seeking the orders over the past three years does not align with several published and anecdotal reports of ongoing domestic violence in the Marshallese community from other agencies on the islands, according to the United Nations Global Sustainable Development group's indicators database.
The 2022 US Human Rights report on the Marshall Islands had cited its World Health Organisation report which "estimated that 38 per cent of every-married or partnered women, aged 15 to 49 (years), experienced intimate-partner violence in their lifetime, while 19 per cent experienced it in the previous 12 months".
The statistics in recent years indicate fewer women are seeking court assistance since the number peaked at an all-time high of 16 cases in 2017 - and not because the violent acts have dissipated - ranging from only one to nine cases from 2021 through to 2025.
The 2025 Pacific Gender Outlook data, issued by UN Women and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, found one-in-five partnered females in the Marshall Islands have experienced physical or sexual abuse. That figure, however, is reportedly lower than those found by other reports on gender-based violence in the country.
Minister of Culture and Internal Affairs, Jess Gasper Jr, told a plenary at the UN earlier last year that what is needed is a "profound shift in social attitudes and political will to truly accept women as equal partners".
"Despite important legal reforms, gender-based violence remains unacceptably high in the Marshall Islands," he said.
The Marshall Islands has implemented education campaigns, police training and extending to crisis support services to bring about change.
Many factors are involved in the challenge that most females find to act against an abusive partner, according to the Pacific Gender Outlook data.
One significant change in recent times that accompanied the data is that women that marry in the Marshall Islands will often move in with the family of their male partner, eliminating the protection of a woman's immediate family members to support the claims as witnesses.
Another problem was the attitude held by some that violent husbands are "disciplining wives" - and that older-generation family members will often brush it aside as nothing to report. This is often coupled with shame many women feel from their family members for seeking assistance, according to further anecdotal reports from Marshallese women experiencing violence in their families.
