14% of 15-29 year olds say they have suffered from one of these
The International Day against Violence against Women is celebrated on 25 November. The Basque Youth Observatory shares the latest data on young people's attitudes to gender-based violence.
To do this we are going to base ourselves on the answers given by young people in the Basque Country aged between 15 and 29 when asked about the seriousness they attribute to different forms of violence. This information is a preview of data from the Basque Youth study that the Basque Youth Observatory carries out every four years and whose latest edition, corresponding to 2020, is in the process of being analysed.
Among other issues, this research aims to find out the assessments that Basque youth make of the seriousness of different forms of violence, from physical and sexual abuse to verbal violence (insults, threats, contempt, etc.), following the concepts defined in the so-called pyramid of violence.
If we consider that this pyramid has four levels, the study has focused on levels 2 and 3. Level 2 refers to attitudes, such as humiliating, demeaning, ignoring, belittling, emotional blackmail, and making someone feel guilty; and level 3, includes physical assault, rape, sexual abuse, threats, shouting at someone, and insults.
More specifically, young people were asked to assess the severity of the following forms of violence:
- Insults
- Not allowing your partner to decide
- Threats
- Not allowing your partner to leave the house
- Forcing your partner to have sex against their will.
- Belittling attitudes
All Basque youth understand that forcing someone to have sex against their will is serious (96% consider it very serious and 4% quite serious).
Limiting the movements of a partner is very serious for 90% and serious for a 9 %, and only one young person in a hundred considers this behaviour to be not serious.
Threatening is very or fairly serious for 98% of young people. There is also a widespread awareness that controlling one's partner on social networks is abuse, with 96% of young people considering this behaviour to be very or fairly serious.
Not letting people decide things is very or fairly serious for 94%. All the proposed behaviours, even those that involve less explicit violence, such as making insults or insults, are considered serious, reaching 94% of those who consider it very or fairly serious to despise the partner and 82% of those who believe that insults are also serious.
The differences by sex are small and occur in the less explicit behaviors of violence, being women the ones who perceive the severity of the violence to a greater extent.
Age makes some differences, although they are also small: below the age of 20 there is less awareness of the seriousness of the more subtle forms of violence.
Moreover, 14% of Basque youth between 15 and 29 years of age say they have suffered some of this violence in a couple's relationship. Among women the percentage is 19% and 8% among men.
The older the age, and therefore the greater the number of relationship experiences, the higher the percentage, reaching 19% in the 25-29 age group, compared to 11% in the 20-24 age group and 8% in the 15-19 age group.