Administrative data collection on violence against women and domestic violence

The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) has developed 13 indicators on intimate partner violence (IPV) to guide the data collection efforts of the police and justice sectors. The indicators developed by EIGE help to assess the progress made at the national level to reduce IPV and domestic violence, and enhance the comparabil­ity of data in alignment with the minimum require­ments of the EU’s Victims’ Rights Directive and the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention.

Findings from EIGE’s previous data collection exercise (2018–2020) indicate that IPV is rarely conceptualised as a distinct type of violence in legal frameworks across the EU. Rather, it is often conceptualised as a form or subset of domestic violence by Member States.

Besides the lack of a common conceptual framework across the EU, challenges include the lack of harmonisations in the way data is collected, in terms of common disaggregation (e.g., according to sex of victims and perpetrators, or relationship between victims and perpetrators). To be able to collect such disaggregated data is key to accurately monitor how Member States are dealing with violence against women and assess the impact of policies that aim to tackle this phenomenon.

EIGE is now conducting a new administrative data collection exercise, with a set of refined indicators, that collect information on different forms of intimate partner violence as recorded by the Police and Justice sectors.