| 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 If hearing about these makes you roll your eyes, you can understand how outdated and irrelevant these numbers are.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. | 