Goals 3 and 5 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are to promote good health and well-being and to achieve gender equality, respectively. To successfully move toward these goals in the area of gender equality, there is the need to understand the underlying legislative or laws that protect women and girls from all forms of domestic violence (DV), including gender-based violence (GBV). The cardinal objective of this study, therefore, was to examine the risk factors of GBV and the physiological effects of GBV. To date, few studies have quantified the relationship between laws on DV and the incidence of DV/GBV. This article fills that gap by using Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data of 12 African countries.