Foreword for Special Issue on the FRA’s European Union–Wide Survey on Violence Against Women

This special issue of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence presents a unique set of articles that are based on a European-wide survey on violence against women that was undertaken by the European Union (EU) Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA—“Fundamental Rights Agency”). The FRA survey interviewed 42,000 women, using a random sampling approach, across the 28 countries (Member States) that make up the EU. ¹ The findings from the survey were launched in March 2014 and received widespread international interest that resulted in nearly 1,500 media articles in the space of a few days—ranging from television and radio news through to newspaper columns and Internet items. The unprecedented attention that the survey received, and continues to receive, reflects a number of factors—chief among which is the “shock” value and newsworthiness of the scale and nature of violence against women that was reported in the survey, which came as a surprise to those not working in fields related to violence against women or in the academic area of feminist and gender studies. Also, it is the continued absence in many countries of comprehensive and regularized data collection on violence against women, including in the countries of the EU—either in the form of official administrative statistics or as victimization survey data (which the FRA survey is based on)—which generates interest in a dataset covering 28 countries.

Having published the main findings from the survey in 2014, which were accompanied by a technical report, in 2015 the Fundamental Rights Agency proceeded to make the full dataset from the survey available in the public domain for further research by interested scholars and those working toward the development of policy responses to address violence against women. This special issue represents the first collection of articles that are dedicated to the survey’s results, and which have been drafted by researchers at the Fundamental Rights Agency who were variously responsible for the development of the survey and the analysis of its results.

Given that the survey emanates from an Agency of the EU, the results reported in this special issue place particular emphasis on the policy context in which the data have been collected and can be used. The first article, by Goodey, provides the reader with an overview of the policy background for action in this area, which is shaped by the current status and interpretation of the legal parameters under which violence against women can be addressed in a pan-EU context. In turn, if the EU’s Member States agree to the Union’s accession to the Council of Europe’s ² Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, the EU’s legal and policy scope to address violence against women will be extended further. Yet, quoting the words of Kilpatrick (2004, 1209) from the beginning of Goodey’s article, it remains the case that “. . . sound public policy is dependent on having good measures of violence against women,” and—to this end—the FRA’s survey seeks to fill this gap with the first EU-wide dataset on the extent, nature, and consequences of violence against women.

As a reference point for the other articles in this special issue, the article by Goodey presents the methodological backdrop to the survey and outlines the various challenges faced when developing a survey instrument for application across 28 countries. The context in which women report violence to a survey is also briefly addressed in this article, with reference to other research that has used very similar questions and approaches to those adopted in the FRA survey. This theme is picked up in other articles in the special issue, which analyze specific patterns in women’s experiences of violence.

The article by Nevala sheds light on an area that has only relatively recently received legal recognition (for example, in the United Kingdom’s 2015 Serious Crime Act, which criminalizes “controlling or coercive behavior in an intimate or family relationship”), but which lies at the heart of many abusive intimate partner relationships—namely, coercive control. Results from the FRA survey are used to construct a measure of coercive control on the basis of severe and repetitive controlling behavior by a woman’s intimate partner. The analysis draws from the 17 items of psychological abuse and control that were asked about in the FRA survey, and looks at the reported frequency of selected items. The article also reveals some interesting patterns when controlling behavior is looked at alongside existing measures of gender equality. Herein, the article points to the fact that coercive control, which receives less attention in research and policy terms in comparison with manifestations of physical and sexual abuse, is perhaps a good measure of (in)equality within a relationship and, hence, within societies more generally.

The article by Latcheva explores women’s experiences of sexual harassment as the most pervasive form of violence reported in the FRA survey. While sexual harassment is typically recognized in the context of work or educational settings, the survey’s findings point to the need to extend our research on and responses to sexual harassment to other areas of life and new modes of abuse—given that in most cases of sexual harassment the perpetrator was unknown to the victim, and cyber-harassment (unwanted sexually explicit emails or SMS messages, and inappropriate advances on social networking sites) is a growing tool for abuse—particularly for younger women. The article presents a detailed breakdown of results according to respondents’ characteristics, with some notable findings, including high rates of reported harassment among women with higher levels of education, including women in professional and management positions. Patterns of abuse are explored in the article using a binomial logistic regression to ascertain the effects of different factors on a woman’s likelihood of being sexually harassed in the 12 months preceding the survey. Mirroring findings from other articles in this special issue, very few women reported the most serious incident of sexual harassment—with only 1% having consulted a lawyer, a victim support organization, or a trade union.

The article by Reichel presents a wide-ranging examination of the survey’s results with respect to the role of socioeconomic status, inequality, and partner behavior as determinants of intimate partner violence. Different hypotheses are explored using logistic regression models that evaluate the influence of various determinants on a woman’s experiences of physical violence at the hands of her current partner. The article also explores what can perhaps be labeled as less “fashionable” factors when looking to identify correlations to explain patterns of violence, such as a male partner’s alcohol abuse and his lower level of education. Various factors are looked at in combination, with the results suggesting that it is the degree of male dominance in a relationship that is significant in determining rates of abuse. Using a predictive model, the article takes the case of a “hypothetical couple” to explore the cumulative impact of various factors on a woman’s risk of experiencing interpersonal violence.

Finally, the article by Till-Tentschert examines the relationship between a woman’s experience of violence in childhood (by an adult) and her later exposure to violence as an adult. Till-Tentschert uses a logistic regression model to explore the relationship between different elements of childhood abuse and risk of exposure to violence in later life (differentiating between partner and nonpartner violence, and between physical, sexual, and psychological violence). As an illustration, a notable finding is the extent to which emotional abuse and neglect in childhood has a very strong explanatory power for exposure to violence later in life. Given that the survey asked women about their retrospective experiences of abuse in childhood—which in the case of older respondents occurred several decades ago—and given that more than half of women who experienced violence in an adult relationship did not indicate abuse as children, the explanatory power between abuse in childhood and later experiences of abuse as an adult has to be interpreted with caution. However, the empirical evidence presented in the article strongly affirms that the particular nature of abuse in childhood has the potential to affect a woman’s heightened exposure to further abuse in adulthood.

In conclusion, many of the women who were interviewed for FRA’s survey had never spoken before about their experiences of violence with anyone. Violence against women remains underreported, and in the context of a survey that covers 28 countries (a number of which have limited research in this area), the FRA dataset presents a rich resource on which to develop further analysis and informed policy responses. Taking the different articles in this special issue as a “package,” it is clear that the extent and nature of women’s experiences of violence—ranging from childhood through to adulthood, and encompassing physical, sexual, and psychological violence by different perpetrators—can be best understood when we work across different areas of analysis and our particular areas of research interest. Looking at the impact of coercive control or understanding abuse in childhood—as just two examples—helps in the formulation of possible explanatory factors, and hence policy interventions, when seeking to address violence against women more comprehensively. As this special issue contains only five articles that focus on specific results from the FRA’s survey, it is apparent that further research needs to be undertaken to both confirm and challenge existing assumptions, and to identify hitherto underexplored patterns and explanatory factors, when looking to understand violence against women in its various forms. For example, women’s experiences of “cyber-harassment” or their experiences of stalking, which can include “cyber-stalking,” are just two areas covered by the survey that warrant more detailed analysis, along with research that engages in the multiple and intersecting grounds that shape the diversity of women’s experiences.

With this in mind, it is hoped that other researchers will want to work with FRA’s violence against women dataset, which can be accessed as follows—https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=7730&type=Data%20catalogue—or by contacting the Fundamental Rights Agency at statistics& surveys@fra.europa.eu