I was wearing jeans and a hoodie when I was sexually assaulted. My mum was wearing trousers and a shirt when her partner beat her up. My friend was wearing pyjamas when her own brother raped her.
Half of all gender-based violence in Europe is committed by someone women once trusted – a former or current partner, a friend, or a relative. While I have always favoured personal stories over numbing statistics, governments seem to love and need hard numbers.
Or at least, that is what I thought.
Full EU-wide figures on violence against women are 10 years old, predating Brexit, any Trump administration, the pandemic, and even Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If hearing about these makes you roll your eyes, you can understand how outdated and irrelevant these numbers are.
Even Eurostat does not track gender violence in its many forms – physical harm, psychological abuse, non-consensual sexual contact, or femicide. It only records the intentional homicide of women, keeping track of the relationship with the murderer.
The EU promised new comparable data this year and provided member states with harmonisation guidelines – but they treated it as optional homework. So far, Eurostat coordinated data collection in only 18 out of 27 EU countries.
As it stands, no one really knows the full scale of gender-based violence in the EU.
Of course, the lack of data on male violence is not accidental – it is politically convenient, as solving the issue would not only challenge existing power structures but also disrupt the comfortable control of the dominant group.
And so privilege goes unchecked and survives, with the complicity of all the female leaders in the EU, from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Parliament President Roberta Metsola to European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde.
When feminists declared “the personal is political” in the 1960s, making sexual abuse a public matter, it still took the EU 64 years to pass its first directive on gender-based violence.
The EU directive entered into force in 2024, but national governments have until 2027 to implement it fully. Until then, abusers will have plenty of time to take advantage of more bodies and the system’s inertia.
Women, instead, are left staring at a piece of legislation that failed to have a consent-based definition of rape to criminalise it. We will still need to prove that we fought back or bled enough to satisfy a police officer or a judge.
But I have another problem with this law. Sure, it defines what is now legally right or wrong, but it fails to call out the role of culture. Culture also shows what is socially accepted, tolerated, or even ignored – and lasts far longer than legal changes in morality.
Our culture, for example, has long framed gender-based violence as a women’s issue, when the truth is that male violence is as much a men’s issue as it is ours. Men, too, are damaged by a culture that teaches power through control.
Despite this, institutions keep giving women the burden of staying safe.
Carry your pepper spray, but only if it is legal where you live. Wear something modest, or risk ‘asking for it.’ Avoid certain streets at night because it is your fault if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This victim blaming is exhausting. Headlines, discussions, and policies always passively framed it as ‘Martina was raped by a man.’ It is never ‘a man raped Martina.’
And after the violence? EU or national support available fails to reach women where they are. Survivors are left to piece themselves back together, wondering whether it was not worth being dead instead.
Life after violence is a life in which therapy to fix your pelvic floor is too expensive because either you pay your rent or fix a broken body. A life of missing periods because your hypothalamus does not feel safe enough to release estrogen.
So you try to live, figuring out whether you matter or not, and how much, and for whom.
Gender-based violence does not break the system – it shows how broken it already is.
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