An Investigation of Models for Under-Reporting in the Analysis of Violence Against Women in Italy

AbstractViolence against women is still one of the most widespread and persistent violations of human rights. Despite this, a significant gap of comprehensive, reliable and up-to-date figures on such a largely uncovered phenomenon remains. To develop efficient and effective policy and legal responses to gender-based violence, accurate data are necessary. Surveys specifically designed to quantify the number of victims of gender violence return prevalence estimates at a given time, and assess the under-detection of violence and its drivers. However, the last Italian Women ’s Safety Survey was conducted by ISTAT in 2014. Given the substantial under-reporting affecting official counts of violence reports to the police, and the lack of recent survey data, up-to-date prevalence estimates cannot be produced. Designing ad hoc techniques suitable to pool data arising from different sources, first of all official police reports, and accounting for the under-reporting, is crucial to understand and measure violence against women to return a realistic picture of this greatly underrated phenomenon and assess its scope. We use publicly available registry data on violence reports in 2020 as a primary source to provide improved estimates of gender violence in the Italian regions, by introducing a Bayesian model that supplements the observed counts with a pool of auxiliary information, including socio-demographic indicators, data on calls from 1522 helpline number and prevalence estimates fr...
Source: Social Indicators Research - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research