DS Gender based violence > Information on data > Policy context EN REVAMP

The number of people who experienced violence is an important aspect of well-being and safety.

To develop efficient and effective policy and legal responses to limit/stop gender-based violence, accurate data are necessary. Thus, the gender equality strategy of the European Commission for 2020-2025 calls for comprehensive, updated and comparable data for policies on combating gender-based violence. It emphasizes that gender-based violence (GBV) is still one of our societies’ biggest challenges. It is deeply rooted in gender inequality, where women and girls of all ages and backgrounds are most affected.

Eliminating gender-based violence and improving knowledge on the topic is one of the priorities of the European Commission. However, in order to develop efficient and effective policy and legal responses to limit/stop gender-based violence, accurate data are necessary as the lack of comparable and reliable data can impede further policy developments.

Since a substantial amount of violent experiences is not reported or officially recorded, it is important to rely on surveys in addition to police statistics. Therefore, the EU-wide survey on gender-based violence was developed. However, it is important to highlight that the extent to which violence is tolerated in the wider community might influence the number of women who are ready to share their violent experiences in the survey. Therefore, survey data itself might only be a close proxy to real prevalence.

The Council of Europe’s Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence also underlined the importance of relevant statistics.

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