Nearly one in three women in the European Union is subjected to some form of violence during her lifetime, the bloc’s rights agency said Tuesday, warning that gender-based violence is ‘widespread, increasingly digital and overlooked’.
Some 30.7 per cent of women across Europe said that they have ‘experienced physical violence and/or sexual violence’ since the age of 15, according to a survey published by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights.
Close to one in 10 women said they have been ‘physically injured by their partner’, FRA said in a statement accompanying the report, with 17.2 per cent saying they have ‘experienced sexual violence, including rape’ or other sexual attacks.
The survey, which was jointly carried out by FRA, Eurostat and the Lithuania-based European Institute for Gender Equality, also revealed that digitalisation has been ‘intensifying abuse’ suffered by women.
‘8.5 per cent of women were cyberstalked’, the report by the Vienna-based FRA said, and 10.2 per cent of those women surveyed ‘had their location monitored or tracked by their intimate partner’.
The study also showed that most violence is ‘widely underreported’ and often ‘overlooked by the institutions meant to address and prevent it’.
Only 6.1 per cent of women reported physical or sexual abuse by their partners to authorities, and merely 11.3 per cent when attacked by non-partners, with ‘shame, fear, self-blame, and lack of trust in police’ being cited as reasons for not reporting.
‘When abuse is normalised, hidden or ignored, it reflects systemic failures to uphold rights,’ FRA Director Sirpa Rautio said in the press release.
Rautio called for better protection, stressing that ‘member states have clear obligations to prevent violence, protect victims and ensure access to justice’.
The new report is the second major study by FRA on violence against women, after an initial study in 2014.
For the survey, more than 1,14,000 women aged 18-74 across the bloc were interviewed between September 2020 and March 2024.
The survey said that in some of the countries where FRA and EIGE conducted the data collection, respondents who took part could self-identify as women, meaning that trans women were allowed to participate, but did not provide any other details.
In 2011, the EU adopted the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women. But five member states — Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, and Slovakia — have refused to ratify the key text.
