Beyond the Numbers: Visibility and the Politics of Gendered Violence

This blog is part of the series “Shrinking Spaces – Creating Spaces” which is hosted by the (Un-)Making Democracy program at Polis180.

I wake up to an Instagram feed flooded with news about Collin Fernandes. I close my eyes. I am tired in a way that is more fatiguing than lacking sleep. I put my phone down because I do not know what to say. Lately, I do not even know whether we are moving forward. It feels like yesterday that I just learned another form of femicide: “Alpine divorce”, they call it. I do not want to get up; everything feels unbearably heavy. Yet, I know that this, too, matters: that I know these names, that these cases break through the everyday scroll. Visibility does not end violence. But invisibility protects it. The absence of headlines does not mean the absence of harm; it means that violence remains hidden and easier to deny. 

A blog post by Melissa Amann

By now, it is a familiar statistic: worldwide, about one in three women¹ experiences physical or sexual violence in her lifetime. But this figure can and should be questioned, and expanded. Yet, the fact that we have such statistics at all is an achievement. Such numbers exist and have been revealed through feminist research, surveys, institutional documentation, and years of struggle to make violence against women and marginalised genders visible as a structural problem. That is why the routine citation of this figure matters politically. It sheds light on what has long been hidden. Gender based violence has never been absent. It was depoliticised, privatised, and trivialised, treated as a family matter or a personal fate. Only through data collection and feminist scholarship did it become legible as a structural problem. Data on gender-based violence, therefore, does more than merely reflect reality: it shifts boundaries. It turns supposedly private experiences into a public issue, silence into a pattern, and individual harm into a political question. When named, documented, and taken seriously, space is created for demands, protection, and political action.

What data on gender-based violence includes

Statistics can tell us a great extent about gender-based violence, but never the whole story. Violence exceeds what surveys are able to count. Data offering insight into the realities faced by victims and survivors include prevalence studies and administrative records from police, healthcare systems, shelters, and hotlines, as well as interviews, case studies, and personal accounts. This data diversity reveals not just the prevalence of gender-based violence, but also institutional failure, namely, unequal access to safety, but also forms of suffering that never enter the official record. Prevalence data make the extent of the problem legible, even beyond reported cases and can help justify laws, prevention strategies, and funding for support services. Administrative data reveal where victims get lost in support systems and can expose gaps in institutional responses. 

At the same time, quantitative data can also narrow public understanding of violence by prioritising what is measurable and overlooking experiences that remain unreported or difficult to quantify. Qualitative research sheds light on what numbers alone cannot capture: fear, shame, dependency, mistrust, and disbelief. For that reason, data is never neutral. It shapes laws, budgets, prevention, and protection, but it can also determine whose experiences are recognised and whose remain invisible. It compels us to stop asking whether the problem exists and to ask instead why so little is being done.

Visibility is neither complete nor innocent

Data is often treated as a technical inventory. It is not. Data structures reality. It determines what becomes recognised, which categories are used, which voices and institutions count, and which responses appear legitimate. Because data is politically powerful, it must also be critically examined. Even progressive visibility produces exclusions. Who is truly included when we speak of “women”? Who fits institutional categories, and who does not? Who is believed? An intersectional and decolonial approach is a methodological necessity. Violence is shaped not only by gender, but by age, disability, race, class, migration, sexuality, place of residence, institutional power, and many other power structures. Ignoring these axes is not neutral; it reproduces a systematic gap. 

Many data systems are built around categories most legible to institutions. People who migrate, live precariously, are disabled, are queer or trans, live in rural areas, or distrust state agencies are often misrecorded or not recorded at all. A decolonial perspective sharpens the question further: who defines violence, which experiences count as comparable, and whose knowledge is dismissed as too subjective? Data collection can itself reproduce power structures when it erases context, replaces local language, and recognises only realities that fit standardised frameworks.

The digital sideline

This tension is particularly evident in the digital sphere. For a long time, online violence was treated as less real, less serious, or as an inevitable side effect of public visibility. Yet, this distinction between online and offline no longer holds politically. The digital sphere is a central site of democratic participation, where people speak, publish, and organise. Those who are threatened, insulted, sexualised, doxed, or harassed online lose not only a sense of safety and dignity but also room to participate in societies. Women*, journalists, academics, activists, and queer people experience digital violence as a strategy of silencing. Consequently, they speak more cautiously or leave platforms altogether. Digital violence is not simply an updated version of traditionally understood violence. It functions as a mechanism of democratic exclusion. 

Digital abuse does not always manifest as explicit public attacks. It can operate quietly and persist for years before being recognised even by those targeted themselves. Yet this invisibility is not accidental. It is reinforced by public sympathy that often remains with perpetrators, shielded by social networks eager to defend them through personal anecdotes and selective doubt, because “he has always been nice to me anyway…”. This social reflex to defend powerful men through personal loyalty or appeals to “neutrality” continues to normalise impunity.

In an age of AI, where the wealthiest man alive is deliberately shaping AI systems that increasingly allow or amplify sexualised content, and where Germany remains home to an extremely deficient legal framework, it is urgent to make the prevalence and consequences of such violence visible, and to demand meaningful protection.

Backlash and the shrinking of democratic space

Yet, there is no linear progress. The increased visibility of gender-based violence over the past decade, driven by feminist movements, survivors’ testimonies, and improved research infrastructures, has opened new spaces within civil society. It has changed public discourse, legislation, and institutional language. But these gains remain fragile. The current backlash is directed not only against equality policies but also against the very ways in which violence is researched, named, and understood. When research programmes are cut, feminist studies delegitimised, and support structures defunded, violence is pushed back into invisibility. The attack is epistemic as much as political. It targets the concepts, methods, and institutions through which violence can be recognised. 

This is why anti-gender backlash should not be treated as a side issue. It challenges the understanding of violence as a social phenomenon and shrinks the democratic space in which it can be discussed, documented, and contested.

Keep researching, keep talking, keep engaging

Data on gender-based violence is not just a measuring tool. It is part of democratic infrastructures. It creates public knowledge, sustains debate, produces pressure for action, and expands civic space. That is precisely why it is contested. In a time of anti-gender mobilisation, researching gender-based violence also means defending democratic space while remaining intersectional, decolonial, and self-critical. If the EU truly values democracy and freedom, it must treat data on gender-based violence as a priority by funding feminist research, strengthening support structures, and holding institutions accountable, since, as argued above, data determines not only what is known, but also what can be recognised, addressed, and politically acted upon. For where this space shrinks, violence does not diminish. It simply becomes invisible once again.

So I ask you: take a breath, gather your strength, get out of bed, and stay optimistic when the news becomes too much to handle. As long as people continue to speak, document, and connect their experiences, spaces will continue to open in which violence can be made visible, named, and politically confronted. 

And I want to say thank you: thank you to every person who speaks up, who finds the courage to report, and who keeps going despite everything stacked against them. You are seen. Your courage creates change. And we stand because you stood first.

Melissa Amann (she/her) joined Polis180 in 2024 and is Co-Lead of the Program “Gender & International Politics” as well as the blog series “Decolonising Feminism(s)”. She studied Public Governance across Borders in Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, and is currently pursuing her master’s in Development Studies in Austria. Her research interests focus on the intersections of gender, governance, and the digital public spheres.

1. By using the term women*, I deliberately adopt an inclusive framing that acknowledges that “woman” is not a uniform or universally experienced category. In much policy and development discourse, however, the dominant understanding of “women” has often been implicitly cisgender and heterosexual, which risks marginalising or excluding sexual and/or gender diverse women and people from both analytical frameworks and policy interventions, including those addressing violence against women and girls. The asterisk therefore signals that gender is not fixed, binary, or universally defined, but shaped by diverse and intersecting lived realities. At the same time, when referring specifically to violence against women, I do not consistently use the asterisk in order to remain aligned with established terminology in legal, statistical, and policy contexts, which typically rely on a more fixed definition of “women” for operational clarity. For more insights draw take these two publications (1 and 2) as starting points for reference, and feel free to stop by the blog “decolonising feminism(s)” for more insights. ↩︎

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Previously from the blog series “Shrinking Spaces – Creating Spaces”

The Polis Blog serves as a platform at the disposal of ‘Polis180’s & ‘OpenTTN‘s members. Published comments express solely the ‘authors’ opinions and shall not be confounded with the opinions of the editors or of Polis180.

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