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IPS131 Maria G. M. et al.
With the aim to respond to the arisen needs the Italian integrated system was
built up. It is a huge container fully accessible online since the 25th of
November 2017 which collect the main data and indicators, but also the
existing legal frameworks, policies and experiences related to the violence
against women. Data are being progressively organised in a dedicated data
warehouse.
The system collects official statistics from both kind of sources, survey data
and register statistics.

2. Methodology
According to the article 3 of the Istanbul Convention, as already defined in
the 1993 UN Vienna Conference, the “violence against women” shall mean all
acts of gender-based violence that result in, or are likely to result in, physical,
sexual, psychological or economic harm or suffering to women, including
threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether
occurring in public or in private life. The “gender-based violence against
women” shall mean violence that is directed against a woman because she is
a woman or that affects women disproportionately. The Convention provides
that States have to consider in their penal code as forms of violence forced
marriages, psychological violence, stalking, physical violence, sexual violence,
including rape, female genital mutilation, forced abortion and forced
sterilisation, sexual harassment.
However these definitions are not operational and using them for
statistical purposes is a very complex issue. Looking for instance at most
serious form of violence, the femicide has not a legal definition in Italy and in
the EU countries since femicide does not represent a specific offence, as on
the contrary happens in 16 countries of Latin America. Representing, however,
a phenomenon of significant interest in the public debate, femicide is
measured for statistical purposes on the basis of the relationship between the
victim of the murder and its perpetrator.
This choice was endorsed at international level in May 2017, when the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Experts Group for the
definition and implementation of the International Classification of Crimes for
statistical purposes (ICCS) decided to adopt as a statistical definition for
“femicide”, the murder of women happened in the family context from
partners, former partners or relatives.
The definition is important, in fact, looking at the Italian data, for instance,
in 2017 123 women were killed, but how many of these murders are femicides?
Considering the perpetrator/victim relationship, almost 3 out of 4 of 123
murders were committed in the family: 35.8% women were killed by partners,
8.1% by former partners and additional 28.5% women by relatives (data from

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