WUNRN
EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT - COMMITTEE ON
WOMEN'S RIGHTS & GENDER EQUALITY
This working document is intended to list existing legislation
in the area of combating violence against women (or related areas), to identify
possible legal bases for a directive (or a set of directives) and finally to
suggest some other ideas for actions at EU level on this key issue.
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B: Statistics
The Parliament has in several resolutions urged
Member States to provide data on VAW.
Moreover, the Council has in its conclusion from
December 2012 called to improve the collection and dissemination of comparable,
reliable and regularly updated data concerning all forms of VAW at both
national and EU level. Today there are few indicators that can measure VAW
since no principles of crime classification systems for statistical use has
been established in the EU and there is no agreed common methodology for
obtaining comparable administrative data. This was as well the reason why the
Gender Equality Index by EIGE could not take VAW properly into account.
In June 2011 the Commission submitted a Proposal
for a Regulation on European statistics on safety from crime (COM(2011)335
final) aiming at establishing a common framework for producing European statistics,
based upon a household/personal survey in the respective Member States. In the
LIBE committee the Commission's proposal has been questioned, among other, as
regards to: its suggested budget (considered to be high and unjustified), its statistical
methodology (considered to be too subjective) and the exception allowed in Article
3 (stating that France and Ireland shall not be required to collect data on
violence between members of the same household). As a consequence, the EP
rejected the proposal in plenary and called for a new one to be submitted by
the Commission.
There is therefore still a need for a new proposal
for EU legislation which establishes a coherent system for collecting
statistics on Violence Against Women in the Member States.