Violence Against Women: Placing Evidence From a European Union-Wide Survey in a Policy Context

Abstract

In the European Union, there continues to be a lack of comprehensive and comparable data on violence against women that can serve to inform policy. In response, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), which undertakes primary data collection across all 28 EU Member States, published the first European Union-wide survey on violence against women in 2014, which interviewed 42,000 respondents. The findings, which show the extent of violence against women-ranging from intimate partner violence through to sexual harassment-can underpin a renewed policy response to violence at the level of the European Union, based on evidence. Having outlined the survey's approach to data collection, including the methodological challenges of undertaking quantitative survey research across 28 countries, the article briefly describes some of the survey's main findings and follows this by focusing on the realities of nonreporting to different services, which illustrates how the survey's data can be usefully employed to inform policy and practical responses to abuse. The article does not adopt a standard academic journal format for reporting and discussing the analysis of data, but instead focuses on the EU policy backdrop that serves to contextualize the survey and its findings, and which underpins other articles in this special issue that draw in detail on FRA's survey results with respect to specific manifestations of violence against women.

Keywords: anything related to domestic violence; anything related to sexual assault; disclosure of domestic violence; domestic violence; legal intervention; reporting/disclosure; sexual assault.