Surveying prevalence of violence against women in the context of the German National Action Plan

Abstract

Against a background of three decades of activism and policy in Germany, the first national representative survey of the prevalence of violence against women was completed in 2004. Placed in the context of a National Action plan, this was the first such study explicitly designed for European comparability. It was aimed at improving policy and harmonizing numerous activities towards overcoming violence against women, taking a comprehensive and gender-based view of the problem. The findings point to important patterns related to the risk of violence and its impact; they also confirm that improved methodology on the one hand, awareness-raising on the other increase reporting. While reporting levels as such are not a useful measure for the success of policies, there is a need for more in-depth and comparative analysis to identify strategic points of intervention and ways of moving policy forward. 1. The study of prevalence and the importance of context Gathering data on the prevalence and patterns of gender-based violence is always political, but it can be significant for politics in different ways. This paper will highlight the background and the development of the German national representative survey on violence against women (16). The survey was commissioned in 2002 as part of the National Action Plan to Combat Violence Against Women published by the German government in 1999, and the results published in 2004. In many countries, for example in Canada or France (11,12), representative surveys have been carried out to demonstrate the existence of interpersonal violence in private life, and have been employed to raise awareness and initiate policy. Following Straus and Gelles in the US (18), the focus has often been the family, as for example in the first national survey implemented in 1999 in Spain (19), fuelling debates on how the state ought to intervene to make the family a safe place. By contrast, in Germany, as in the UK and the Netherlands, it was the testimony of victims, made public by the women's movement, that raised awareness - beginning with the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women in Brussels in 1974, followed by public testimony out of the shelters for battered women. The appropriate response of the state was seen as funding places of safety, support and advocacy for victimized women and their children without regard to their family status (4,8). The role of research in cooperation with services for women was to document and analyse how the violence arose, what its effects were on women and their lives, and what women need to leave a violent situation. By the mid 1990's, there were in Germany - with a population of 81 million - over 400