**Background:** Gender-based violence (GBV) is a global public health and human rights problem exacerbated by social and environmental stressors. Climate shocks—sudden disruptions in temperature or precipitation such as droughts, floods, and extreme heat—are increasing worldwide and disproportionately affect developing countries with limited adaptive capacity. Food security, defined by the United Nations as physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food, is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where up to 30% of the population is undernourished. Women and female children are often first to be neglected during food insecurity due to economic, cultural, and structural factors, including reduced independent income and resource allocation favoring male household members. When men experience psychological stress from food insecurity, they often direct frustration toward women. The COVID-19 pandemic has provided real-time insight into how disasters disrupt food supply chains and increase GBV through heightened stress, economic insecurity, and stay-at-home orders. While bivariate associations between climate shocks and food insecurity, and between food insecurity and GBV, have been documented, the three-way interrelationship has not been fully investigated.
**Methods:** The authors conducted a scoping review following Joanna Briggs Institute methodology. Seven databases were searched: MEDLINE (Ovid), Embase (Ovid), Global Health (Ovid), BIOSIS, Web of Science, CAB Direct, and Africa Wide, plus two grey literature sources (WHO IRIS and NGO Google custom search). Two authors independently reviewed 231 de-duplicated records; eight additional records were identified from reference lists. Records were coded for whether they addressed food security, climate change, and gender-based violence. Records addressing all three concepts, or two including GBV, proceeded to full-text review. Twenty full-text records were assessed for inclusion using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. Content analysis was performed using Leximancer software to extract conceptual and relational meanings. System dynamics modeling, adapted from the COPEWELL (Composite of Post Event Well-Being) framework, was used to integrate findings and model community functioning after disasters at a spatial scale equivalent to a US county.
**Key Results:** Twenty publications (dating from 1982 onward) were included. Eleven of 20 contained empirical evidence, though none employed strong causal study designs. Spatial scales ranged from cities to global; social scales from individual to regional food security; ecological scales from South Asia to Latin America. Documented GBV types included domestic physical abuse (beatings), domestic economic abuse (food allocation, school withdrawal, inheritance denial), domestic sexual abuse (early marriage, forced pregnancy), non-domestic sexual abuse (rape, sex-for-food, trafficking, forced prostitution), non-domestic psychological abuse (harassment), and femicide (witch killings). Case studies included the 1998 Dhaka floods (Bangladesh), where severe flooding increased food prices and unemployment, leading to rising domestic violence; the 1997 drought in Papua New Guinea, where food insecurity among the Hawa people increased witch killings targeting women; and reports from Senegal and Ghana linking disasters to rape, forced prostitution, and early marriage. The Leximancer concept analysis confirmed that 75% or more of context blocks were coded with the key concepts "health," "climate," "women," "food," and "security." The system dynamics model demonstrated that a major disaster event reduces community functioning by approximately 50% very quickly, with recovery driven by three stocks: social cohesion, preparedness and response, and external resources.
**Clinical Implications:** The review suggests that development and adaptation of evidence-based interventions to reduce the effects of climate shocks and bolster food security may ultimately decrease GBV prevalence and impact. The COVID-19 pandemic reinforces the interconnectedness of these concepts, demonstrating how disasters cause food insecurity, which can lead to increased GBV through multiple pathways: economic insecurity and poverty-related stress, quarantines and social isolation, disaster-related unrest, exposure to exploitative relationships, reduced health service availability, virus-specific sources of violence, inability to escape abusive partners, and violence in response efforts. The authors call for more targeted causal research (e.g., process tracing, causal loop diagramming) and note that a full systematic review and meta-analysis would be premature given the limited and heterogeneous literature. The findings cut across politics, ethics, and science, and the authors urge policymakers, funders, and researchers to prioritize this intersection.