Violence

Data collection systems vary widely across EU Member States, as they draw on various sources. To improve the collection of administrative data on femicide, EIGE has been working to establish indicators that can harmonise data collection processes across Member States’ jurisdictions. EIGE has collected information from a wide variety of stakeholders through a questionnaire sent to official data providers and an online survey filled in by national experts.

Sound and comparable data on the gender-related killing of women and girls is central to preventing this crime, through understanding its prevalence, based on a commonly acknowledged definition and typology of femicide, with recognised variables, units of measurement and indicators. Data-collection systems across the EU Member States remain very heterogeneous, as they are grounded in national crime statistics or other administrative data sources on homicide (from the judiciary or health system) or from non-governmental organisations’ media analysis.

Sound and comparable data on gender-related killings of women and girls is essential to understanding the prevalence of femicide. This data gathering must be based on a commonly acknowledged definition of femicide and recognised units of measurement and indicators, as well as a typology of femicide. This report gives a comprehensive overview of definitions, data collection systems, methodologies and variables in gathering data on femicide.

This literature review contributes to a comparative analysis of definitions of, types of, indicators of and data collection systems on femicide in the EU Member States and the United Kingdom, and at international level. It is based on a comprehensive and in-depth search for studies published in respected peer-reviewed journals and in books. The aim is to give an overview of the existing multidisciplinary literature on variables and factors used to identify femicide and gender-related motives of female homicides.

Since 2013, the Gender Equality Index has been recognised by EU institutions and Member States as a key benchmark for gender equality in the EU. The 6th edition of the Index covers a range of indicators in the domains of society and life most afected by the COVID-19 crisis. Although Index scores are mostly based on 2019 data, and therefore cannot capture the full impact of the crisis on gender equality, the report provides ample evidence of the pandemic’s negative repercussions on women in the domains of work, money, knowledge, time, power and health.

This report provides recommendations to the Member States of the European Union and the United Kingdom to improve the quality, availability and comparability of data on intimate partner violence against women, based on a thorough review of the work on the 13 police and justice indicators carried out by EIGE since 2017. These indicators were selected based on their planning and monitoring policy relevance and on data availability and completeness.

According to a 2014 study by the Fundamental Rights Agency, 31 % of women in the European Union have experienced physical violence by either a partner or a non-partner since the age of 15, and 7 % of women experienced physical violence by anyone in the 12 months before the survey interview. Given the size of the phenomenon, gender-based violence has far-reaching, harmful consequences for many families and communities.

Since 2012, the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) has mapped the situation of female genital mutilation (FGM) in the European Union, identified good practices to tackle it and developed a methodology to estimate the number of women and girls at risk. This common methodology was originally presented in 2015, pilot tested in three Member States (EIGE, 2015), further refined and applied to an additional six Member States (EIGE, 2018).