Sensation: EU Fundamental Rights Agency makes progress on research methodology. But there is still much room for improvement.

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D. | March 17, 2014

The EU’s controversial Fundamental Rights Agency has recently published a new survey, this time on “Violence against Women“.

Since the Agency was set up in 2007, its legal expertise and social research have drawn severe criticism because of their glaring ideological bias and apparent lack of quality. The latest example was a so-called “LGBT Survey” published in 2013, which disrespected even the most basic rules of serious-minded social research. In particular, it was based on responses to a questionnaire that could be anonymously filled in on the internet, without any control of who responded, and without any firewall to prevent multiple responses from one and the same person. The results of that survey, which cost EU taxpayers nearly 400.000 Euro, were therefore devoid of any scientific relevance – it was bogus science that served an apparent propagandistic purpose.

As I hear, the FRA’s director Morten Kjaerum is an assiduous reader of this blog. If that is so, it may well be that our critique of the LGBT Survey has convinced him that the FRA must improve the methodology of its research. The new report on “Violence against Women” represents – as we are happy to acknowledge – a first step forward. As one can read in the technical report, this survey is based on interviews with a randomly selected representative sample of women throughout Europe, and is therefore more likely to reflect the reality on the ground than the ominous “LGBT Survey”.

Yet there still are some critical points:

First, the report makes rather sensational statements, such as:
• 33% of women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence since the age of 15. That corresponds to 62 million women.
• 22% have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by a partner.

However, if one takes a closer look one finds that the term “violence” is not very well circumscribed, so that widely different cases can be added up to arrive at these high figures. In other words, the report appears to be written with the intention of aggrandizing the problem.

Second, the report appears to be based on some pre-ordained gender stereotypes that it seeks to confirm: women are victims of violence, and men are perpetrators. Violence perpetrated by women against men will not appear in this study, simply because it is outside the study’s scope. But this means that the FRA does not wee this part of reality because it does not want to see it.

This lop-sided and stereotyping approach is certainly strange at a time when it emerges that domestic violence perpetrated by women is just as frequent (if not more) than violence perpetrated by men. I recommend to the attention of my readers (and especially to Morten, if he reads this) the following reports:

So maybe the FRA’s next big survey could be more gender-neutral – this could help in putting findings into perspective. Important discoveries are only made by those who have an open mind.

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