Journal of Interpersonal Violence

In the European Union, there continues to be a lack of comprehensive and comparable data on violence against women that can serve to inform policy. In response, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), which undertakes primary data collection across all 28 EU Member States, published the first European Union–wide survey on violence against women in 2014, which interviewed 42,000 respondents. The findings, which show the extent of violence against women—ranging from intimate partner violence through to sexual harassment—can underpin a renewed policy response to violence at the level of the European Union, based on evidence. Having outlined the survey’s approach to data collection, including the methodological challenges of undertaking quantitative survey research across 28 countries, the article briefly describes some of the survey’s main findings and follows this by focusing on the realities of nonreporting to different services, which illustrates how the survey’s data can be usefully employed to inform policy and practical responses to abuse. The article does not adopt a standard academic journal format for reporting and discussing the analysis of data, but instead focuses on the EU policy backdrop that serves to contextualize the survey and its findings, and which underpins other articles in this special issue that draw in detail on FRA’s survey results with respect to specific manifestations of violence against women.

Research on intimate partner violence has suggested that not all violence is the same. This article builds upon earlier research on coercive control—or intimate terrorism—and examines the experiences of women who can be assessed as having experienced coercive controlling violence both in terms of the types of violent incidents they experience and the impact and consequences of the most serious incident of violence by an intimate partner. The article explores differences across the 28 European Union (EU) Member States in terms of coercive control and type of violence used. The results—based on data from the first EU–wide survey on violence against women by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights—are further considered in terms of their association with gender equality. The results show that, in the EU, violence against women perpetrated under coercive control differs from other forms of violence as it involves more serious forms of violence and has a bigger impact in terms of its varied consequences. Countries where women indicated lower levels of coercive control are shown as scoring higher on a measure of gender equality, in contrast with earlier interpretations of the survey findings concerning the relationship between survey measures of physical and/or sexual violence and gender equality. The analysis supports the need to differentiate between various types of intimate partner violence against women—including violence under coercive control—in the European context, both in terms of research to better understand violence and for interventions to prevent violence.

Sexual harassment is recognized as discrimination on the grounds of sex and as a breach of the principle of equal treatment between men and women. The survey of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) on violence against women shows, however, that sexual harassment remains a pervasive and common experience for many women in the European Union. Dependent on the type of incident recorded, an estimated 83 to 102 million women (45%-55% of women) in the 28 EU Member States have experienced at least one form of sexual harassment since the age of 15. It also becomes apparent that many women do not talk with anyone about their experiences of sexual harassment, and very few report the most serious incidents to their hierarchy at work or to a responsible authority. Sexual harassment occurs in various settings and uses different means, such as the Internet. The FRA survey results indicate that sexual harassment against women involves a range of different perpetrators and includes the use of “new” technologies. The survey shows that sexual harassment disproportionately affects younger women, and that it is more commonly perceived and experienced by women with a university degree and women in the highest occupational groups. The article outlines key findings from the FRA Violence Against Women Survey with regard to the extent, forms, and consequences of sexual harassment in the European Union. It offers a critical discussion of existing definitions and measurements of sexual harassment, underlines how these significantly influence the reported prevalence rates in official or survey data, and points to relevant factors which explain the observed individual and country differences.

This article presents an analysis of determinants of intimate partner violence (IPV) in the European Union (EU). Based on an EU-wide survey with 42,000 women that examined women’s diverse experiences of violence—from violence by strangers to sexual harassment—this article looks specifically at the survey’s research with respect to the occurrence of IPV in current partnerships. The analysis explores selected determinants of IPV by focusing on specific indicators in relation to a couple’s socioeconomic status, and analyzes inequalities in the sense of unequal distribution of resources. In addition, a partner’s behavior outside a relationship, as captured through specific survey questions, is looked at as providing additional evidence of factors that strongly indicate IPV. The results of the article show that, when averaging across the EU Member States, among couples with lower socioeconomic status, there is higher prevalence of violence. In particular, women reporting problems with their household income also report higher rates of IPV. Furthermore, women suffer more often from violence if they do not have an equal say about household income. While reported inequality in income between partners, in the sense of a partner earning more or less than a woman, does not show a consistent result, a woman who reports having less say about the family income is more likely to experience IPV. This result points to the importance of “norm” related inequality compared with actual inequality with respect to IPV, which holds true across all EU Member States. Finally, a partner’s behavior—in terms of being violent outside a relationship and frequently getting drunk—shows a strong influence on women reporting incidents of IPV across all countries in the survey.

Experiences of violence in childhood can affect women’s later exposure to violence and their risk of victimization. Comparable data on the extent of abuse in childhood are still rare. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) conducted in 2012 the first comparative European Union (EU)-wide survey on violence against women. This article looks at the extent and effects of childhood experiences of violence reported by women in the FRA violence against women survey in all 28 EU Member States. The article does not examine abuse and violence by children toward other children, as the FRA’s survey—which forms the basis of the analysis in this article—interviewed respondents aged 18 years and above. Women who indicated having experienced violence by an adult perpetrator before the age of 15 years appear to be at greater risk of experiencing physical and sexual abuse in later life. Factors such as the severity and frequency of violence in childhood and the type of perpetrator of childhood abuse have an impact on later victimization of women. The article examines the relation between childhood experiences of violence and later exposure to partner and nonpartner violence, by severity, frequency, and type of perpetrator. The results confirm that already a single incidence of violence in childhood increases the likelihood of revictimization at a later stage in life. The findings also show that sexual and emotional abuse in childhood has particularly strong effects on women’s lifelong experience of violence with respect to both intimate partner and nonpartner violence. The findings are assessed in the light of how to prevent cycles of abuse.