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\t\t\tIllustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Getty Images<\/p>\n
Gender-based violence is a grim problem around the globe. According to the World Health Organization<\/a>, an estimated 840 million women have experienced domestic or sexual violence during their lifetime, a figure that\u2019s barely budged since 2000.<\/p>\n There are a ton of factors at play. A UN brief<\/a> from earlier this year explains that extreme weather, housing insecurity, economic instability, and hunger all contribute to increases in violence against women. There\u2019s certainly no shortage of any of those elements throughout the world, and unless the global economic system<\/a> underlining these fault lines is ditched, that\u2019s unlikely to change in the near future.<\/p>\n Now, new research has found that there may be a stopgap \u2014 though it\u2019s bound to be controversial: a nearly decade-long trial by a battery of Australian researchers found evidence that regularly dosing impulsive men with a common antidepressant could be the key to reducing the rate of domestic violence.<\/p>\n To pull off the first-of-its-kind study<\/a>, published in The Lancet\u2019s eClinicalMedicine journal, researchers from the University of New South Wales and the University of Newcastle selected 630 men convicted for violent offenses to track from 2013 to 2021. Participants were randomly given either sertraline, an SSRI better known by the brand name Zoloft, or a placebo in a double-blind trial, meaning that neither the researchers nor the participants were aware of who was taking a placebo.<\/p>\n The results were striking. At the end of the trial, the participants who were taking the antidepressant showed a significant reduction in domestic violence re-offenses.<\/p>\n A year into the study, for example, reported incidents of domestic violence were 5.7 percent lower in the group taking sertraline than in the control group. By the end of the study, the rate of repeated domestic violence offending, which the researchers define as \u201cmore than one offense in 24 months,\u201d was 44 percent lower in the medicated group.<\/p>\n As the team explains in a blog post on The Conversation<\/a>, sertraline works by increasing the levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. Previous<\/a> research<\/a> has shown that serotonin acts like an emotional braking system, allowing people to think out their responses before they act.<\/p>\n