The Missing Perpetrators in EU Violence Data

Nearly one in three women in the European Union has experienced physical or sexual violence during her lifetime. That is the finding of a major survey conducted by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), Eurostat and the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). More than 100,000 women across all 27 member states were questioned about experiences of violence, sexual harassment, intimate partner abuse and violence during childhood.

The figures are striking. In Germany, one in four women reports having experienced physical violence, threats or sexual violence. Almost 15% of women between the ages of 18 and 74 say they have experienced sexual violence. Nearly half of German women report having suffered physical or psychological abuse by their parents during childhood.

The cross-country comparison also appears dramatic at first glance. In Finland, 57% of women report experiences of violence, compared with 52% in Sweden and 47.5% in Denmark. Bulgaria, Poland and Portugal report substantially lower figures. However, these results do not necessarily establish a simple ranking of safer and less safe countries. The survey measures not only violence itself but also people’s willingness to speak about it, public awareness and societal openness.

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The Survey Is Not a Police Report

The EU survey is based on self-reported experiences rather than police reports or court convictions. That distinction matters.

Many incidents never appear in official crime statistics. Overall, 86% of women who experience violence or harassment do not report it to the police. Reporting rates are particularly low in cases involving intimate partner violence.

The survey uses standardized questions to make responses comparable across member states. While methodologically sound, this also means that the categories used do not necessarily correspond to criminal-law definitions in each country. What a respondent describes as sexual violence, harassment or psychological abuse is not automatically the same as a legally established criminal offense.

Comparisons between countries therefore remain complicated. High figures in Scandinavia may reflect higher levels of violence. They may also indicate that women are more willing to discuss their experiences and more likely to identify certain behavior as violence. Conversely, lower figures elsewhere may reflect genuine differences, greater social stigma, lower reporting rates or less trust in institutions.

The data therefore reveal not only what happens, but also what people are willing to report.

Source: Eurostat, EU-GBV-Survey, coordinated by Eurostat, FRA and EIGE. Survey round: 2021.

The Perpetrator Question Remains Unanswered

For policymakers, however, this is not enough.

Anyone serious about reducing violence against women must also understand who commits it. The survey primarily categorizes perpetrators by their relationship to the victim: current partners, former partners, relatives, acquaintances, strangers and other non-partners.

That information is relevant, but it leaves unanswered other questions that are crucial for public policy, including background, immigration status, criminal history, social environment, location of offenses and repeat offending.

This gap is particularly significant in countries that have experienced large-scale immigration. Domestic violence, workplace harassment, violence within isolated communities and assaults committed by strangers in public spaces are distinct phenomena that require different responses.

Reducing all of these categories to a single concept of “male violence” may offer a moral framework, but it provides limited guidance for targeted policymaking.

This is where the EU debate becomes less focused. The statistics are often used to justify broad European policy responses: stronger victim protection, awareness campaigns, harmonized legislation or consent-based definitions of rape under the principle that “only yes means yes”.

Such measures may be important. But they focus on legal definitions rather than the characteristics of perpetrators.

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Numbers Are Only the Beginning

Legal reforms can play a role. But they cannot replace a detailed understanding of offenders, effective policing, a functioning justice system, the deportation of foreign criminals or an honest debate about the social environments in which violence occurs or goes unreported.

The EU figures are therefore a starting point, not a conclusion.

They show how many women have experienced violence. They highlight the scale of underreporting. They suggest that violence against women may be more widespread than official crime statistics indicate.

But the missing piece remains the perpetrators themselves.

As long as that question remains unanswered, policy conclusions will remain incomplete. The key issue is not only how many victims there are, but who the perpetrators are – and why the state so often fails to stop them.