The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (abbreviated as DEVAW) was adopted without a vote by the United Nations General Assembly in the 48/104 resolution of 20 December 1993. Contained within it is the recognition of "the urgent need for the universal application to women of the rights and principles with regard to equality, security, liberty, integrity and dignity of all human beings". It recalls and embodies the same rights and principles as those enshrined in such instruments as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Articles 1 and 2 provide the most widely used definition of violence against women. Background The international recognition that women have a right to a life free from violence is a recent one, emerging around 1970. Historically, their struggles with violence, and with the impunity that often protects the perpetrators, is linked with their fight to overcome discrimination. Since its founding the United Nations has concerned itself with the advancement of women's rights through institutions such as the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), but did not specifically target the high rates of females who were targeted with violence until the early 1990s. The 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) never mentioned violence against women; the June 1993 Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (VDPA) was the first international document to explicitly condemn violence against women. The DEVAW resolution was developed as an extension of CEDAW, and explicitly states that the strengthening and complementing of CEDAW is one of its goals. In September 1992, the CSW appointed a special working group to prepare a draft declaration against violence against women. One of the aims of the resolution was to overturn the prevailing governmental stance that violence against women was a private, domestic matter not requiring state intervention. At the time, it was known that wife beating (often grouped under the terms "domestic violence" or "intimate partner violence") was the most common form of violence against women. For example, Levinson (1989) found that, in 86% of ninety studied cultures, there was structural violence by husbands against their wives; other studies at the time demonstrated a similar cross-cultural pattern. The health consequences of such violence were considerable; for example, in the United States, it was the leading cause of injuries in women, 22–35% of women who visited emergency rooms did so because of symptoms