WUNRN
WAVE - Women Against Violence Europe
WAVE CALLS FOR COMPREHENSIVE DATA ON VAW: A CONTINUOUS AND SYSTEMATIC COLLECTION OF DATA IS INDISPENSABLE TO EFFECTIVELY PLAN MEASURES TO PREVENT VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
8th March 2013: International Women's Day provides an opportunity to celebrate progress and call for commitment to women’s rights, peace and equality. WAVE (Women Against Violence Europe) would like to seize the opportunity to highlight the importance of collecting comprehensive data on violence against women.
WAVE is committed to promoting and pushing forward the need for gender-based data on violence against women at the national and European level and has been collecting data on women’s services and the prevalence of violence against women since 2008. It is important to acknowledge that violence against women is gender based and thus needs to be surveyed in a specific way. It is crucial that NGOs as well as state organizations collect and process such data and collaborate in order to achieve comprehensive evaluations.
Currently at the European level, the most recent and most powerful legally binding document in the EU regarding violence against women is ‘The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence’. The so-called Istanbul Convention states the need to ‘collect disaggregated relevant statistical data at regular intervals on cases of all forms of violence... in order to stimulate international co-operation and enable international benchmarking’ (Article 11, Data collection and research, 1a).
The Istanbul Convention addresses the lack and insufficiency of existing data. As a result, legal and policy measures regarding violence against women and domestic violence cannot be evaluated and monitored adequately. A continuous and systematic collection of data is indispensable to effectively plan measures to prevent violence against women.
In the framework of WAVE’s project ‘PROTECT II - Capacity Building in Risk Assessment and Safety Management to Protect High Risk Victims’, WAVE issued a number of recommendations to EU Member States and their representative bodies.
In order to reflect the gender-based aspect of violence against women, the following data variables are needed, across all types of administrative data sources:
Additionally, WAVE recommends to include specifications regarding the type of relationship between victim and perpetrator:
Download WAVE’s GenderStat Report on how to improve the collection of data on violence against women in Europe
Furthermore, WAVE recently became a project partner of ‘Coordinated efforts - toward new European standards in protection of women from gender based violence’ aims at contributing to the finding of comprehensive legal and policy solutions for the protection of women against gender-based violence in the Western Balkans. One of its objectives is to develop means to evaluate and improve data collection in Eastern European countries with regard to directions as laid out in the Istanbul Convention. Outcomes and updates on this project will be published on WAVE’s website.
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For further information and inquiries, please contact
Maria Rösslhumer, office@wave-network.org
or Miriam Freudenberg, miriam.freudenberg@wave-network.org