Ms Margaret Martin:

The research that I referred to from the EU Fundamental Rights Agency was the last substantial research done on violence against women. It included face-to-face interviews in each country and one can access those data. That gives some sense of the figures. Anecdotally, people often ask me if I think that the level of domestic violence is increasing. When we get a high level of promotion, there is an increase in the demand for our services. It happens when people know that there is somewhere that they can go. For example, when Clodagh Hawe was murdered, we had a 48% spike in the number of calls about that in the following weeks. There is a correlation between awareness that help is available and people seeking it. That says that there is a much bigger need, but we have very poor data to assess this with. We conducted research which showed that one in five women experiences domestic violence at some point in their lives. No other research has shifted that. In 2005, the National Crime Council indicated that severe abuse happened in one of seven cases. We still do not have the measure of this. With the Istanbul Convention, good data are required because until one has good data, one cannot have good solutions.