Yet however minimal the increase, every victim is one victim too many. The minister did highlight the importance of looking beyond numbers. In light of this, Bofferding wishes to wait until autumn so as to deliver a more detailed report.
According to police reports, the past year counted 739 incidents, meaning officers were called twice a day. These interventions in turn resulted in 321 orders to leave.
One of the main questions in the report is whether the actual level of violence has gone up or whether people are more willing to report incidents in the first place.
The question is difficult to answer, the minister responded, stating it requires further successful collaboration between police forces, the public prosecutor's office and other support services.
Whatever the case, Bofferding made it clear that these numbers were too high, declaring that this was already an "enormous amount", a statement which MP Françoise Hetto of the Christian Social People's Party supported.
The minister further lamented the alarming reality of consistent re-offenders, with perpetrators being 'removed' from situations up to four or five times within a couple of years. She further queried whether other kinds of intervention would not prove more successful. Djuna Bernard of the Greens noted that statistics on national femicides (the murder of a woman or girl, particularly by a men and because of her gender) - of which there were two this past year - were lacking, and while this was the case, Bofferding announced it was still something she planned to act upon.
She affirmed that this was, unfortunately, an international phenomenon to which the Grand Duchy had to respond. Even if the country had only witnessed two incidents, these were still two too many, and it was important to have concrete preventative and institutional action plans in place. Establishments such as specific monitoring and analysis centres were thus unequivocally necessary.
Another problem enmeshed within the issue at hand was that of housing and accommodation, even in cases where perpetrators had been ordered to leave since these were putting communes under pressure, remarked Gilles Baum of the Democratic Party.
While victims tend to be female, men are of course also susceptible to be at the receiving end of this kind of abuse. And while it's important to take care of victims, there need to be frameworks to deal with perpetrators as well.
As previously mentioned, the statistics will be reviewed in detail around September.
Public consultation: Inequality between men and women still very much present
