Abstract
This paper assesses the methodologies of the new national surveys of violence against women, including those in the US, Canada, Australia, Finland and the Netherlands, as well as the British Crime Survey. The development of large-scale quantitative survey methodology so as to be suitable for such a sensitive subject has involved many innovations. The paper concludes with recommendations for further improvements including: the sampling frame, the scaling of both sexual assaults and range of impacts, the recording of series rather than merely single events, the collection of disagregated socio-economic data and criminal history. Violent crime against women has given rise to concern, but to far less data collection than that for property crime. Rape is the crime women are more worried about than any other, yet there is little data about its extent in the UK. Thirty-one per cent of women are very worried about rape, according to the British Crime Survey (BCS) in 1997, more than any other crime. Yet there are no reliable national estimates of the extent of rape or indeed any other form of sexual assault. Women are much more likely to be assaulted by people that they know, while assaults by known assailants are much less likely to be reported to the police than those by strangers (Gartner and Macmillan 1995). Nearly half of women who are murdered are killed by their partners—47 per cent of 224 (Criminal Statistics for England and Wales 1997). Yet, despite most assault on women taking place domestically, the police do not routinely collect statistics on domestic violence as a category. New research methods, especially the use of dedicated surveys in other countries, have been uncovering ever higher rates of violence against women. For instance, Statistics Canada found that 51 per cent of women had experienced violence at some point in their lifetime (39 per cent sexual assault, 34 per cent physical violence and 29 per cent spousal assaults) and 10 per cent in the previous year (Statistics Canada 1993). The methodology of the Statistics Canada survey has now been replicated in Australia, Finland and Iceland and is under development in Sweden, Germany and Ireland. The UK lags behind in these developments, making reliable estimates of the extent and patterns of rape and domestic violence difficult to obtain. The British Crime Survey, when introduced, was a state of the art generic crime survey, however, it does not utilize state of the art methods on issues of violence against women. Elsewhere specialized methodologies have been developed to provide information on crimes of violence against women. Estimates derived from the BCS suggest that less than 1 per cent of women are subjected to rape or other sexual assault each year, but such figures are usually unpublished because even the Home Office felt them to be unreliably low (Percy and Mayhew 1997). The first generation methodology of the 1998 British Crime Survey
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