OSCE-led survey reveals violence against women in South-Eastern and Eastern Europe

On the occasion of International Women’s Day, OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger presented to participating States a report that gives a detailed picture of the physical, sexual and psychological violence suffered by women and girls in South-Eastern and Eastern Europe in the past decades. The presentation was held on 8 March 2019 in Vienna.

“Violence against women and girls is a human rights violation that has wide-reaching consequences: it not only threatens the security and safety of its victims, but also influences the communities and societies they live in,” said Greminger.

The report presents the results of a survey undertaken in 2018 in seven OSCE participating States: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Moldova and Ukraine. The survey also covered Kosovo. More than, 15,000 women aged 18 to 74 were interviewed for the report.

The OSCE Survey on the Well-being and Safety of Women was designed to provide high-quality data to increase understanding of women’s experience of violence in conflict and non-conflict situations. In addition to a quantitative view, it also provides a unique qualitative insight into the prevalence and consequences of violence against women, and into persistent norms and attitudes in the region that tend to perpetrate this violence.

The survey was based on the methodology used by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) for its report Violence against women: an EU-wide survey, published in 2014. Joanne Goodey, Head of the Freedoms and Justice Department at FRA, provided insight into overall trends in the EU and the surveyed countries in Eastern Europe and South Eastern Europe: “With this OSCE-led survey, we have the largest dataset globally on violence against women, and now we have to harness the power of data to enact change.”

Rosa Logar, Director of the Domestic Violence Intervention Centre in Vienna and member of the Council of Europe GREVIO Committee, which monitors the implementation of the Istanbul Convention, stressed how important it is to recognize the economic costs of violence against women to society: “Prevention of violence occurring in the first place is the best investment a State can make.”

The project manager of the OSCE survey, Serani Siegel, presented the main findings of the report. The survey reveals that 70 per cent of the women interviewed have experienced some form of violence, and 45 per cent have experienced at least one form of sexual harassment, since the age of 15. Twenty-one per cent of the women interviewed experienced physical, sexual or psychological violence during childhood (up to the age of 15).

This project was funded by the European Union and also supported by the UN Population Fund, UN Women and UNICEF as well as by the governments of Austria, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, the United States and Sweden. A copy of the report can be downloaded at www.osce.org/VAWsurvey.