What is violence? How should it be measured? What are the implications for policy to halve violence against women and girls in ten years?
- Date & time
- –
- Speaker
- Professor Sylvia WalbyDepartment of Geography and Sociology, Royal Holloway, University of London
- Host
- Social Policy and Intervention (Department)
- Series
- Professor Kenneth Nelson
- Location
- St John's College, Garden Quad Auditorium, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3JP, United Kingdom
- Organisation
- Oxford
Topics
About this talk
Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture. According to the metric selected, violent crime is variously going up (police recorded crime), going down (Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), main series), or flat (CSEW, self-completion module). The ONS statistics on violent crime suffer from sex bias; and the reduction of the cap on the number of incidents from 5 to the 98th percentile does not remove that bias, which especially affects female victims of high frequency domestic violence. The Government has created a new metric to provide accountability for its Strategy to halve Violence Against Women and Girls in ten years, but this has ten flaws. The underlying issues are as much conceptual as technical. They concern the definition of violence, of seriousness, of women, and the decision to create a separate field rather than to correct the sex bias in the mainstream. There are remedies. These will be proposed. They have implications for the prioritisation of resources supporting interventions to reduce violence against women and girls. Official statistics are powerful instruments in making social issues visible and in crystalising the priorities of policy fields. Lecture followed by Q & A. Please allow 15 minutes to reach the Auditorium from the Porter's lodge.
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