Legislation
Implementation
The 2021 wave of the EU-GBV survey is not covered by any official EU legislation and the first wave of the data collection in September 2020 to March 2024 took place on a voluntary basis.
The survey implementation at national level took place in 18 EU countries. These are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain.
Data from the other EU countries were collected either
- based on an existing national survey, if a comparable survey was available, or
- by a separate data collection by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights and the European Institute for Gender Equality following Eurostat's questionnaire and methodology.
This is done to cover the rest of the EU countries and get EU-wide data on gender-based violence, as agreed by the crime and criminal justice statistics working group.
Concerning non-EU countries, the survey was implemented in the following countries: Iceland, Montenegro, Serbia, North Macedonia and Kosovo*, while Bosnia and Herzegovina and Albania conducted some methodological work.
The implementation of the EU-GBV survey wave 2027 was discussed in the meeting of the European Statistical System Committee (ESSC) in May 2025 where the proposal to conduct the survey based on ESS agreement was supported.
* This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSCR 1244/1999 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo Declaration of Independence.