The advisory board has been established by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth (Bundesministerium für Familien, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend, BMFSFJ) following the Istanbul Convention and will cooperate with the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community (Bundesministerium des Innern, für Bau und Heimat, BMI) and the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA).
The objective of this working group is to identify the numbers of unreported cases of domestic violence (i.e., the dark figure of crime) for both women and men in Germany. This information is vital for policymaking and for assessing the effectiveness of existing policy measures.
The main task of the advisory board is to accompany the entire survey process and advise the BMFSFJ, the BMI, and the BKA on all questions relating to surveying victims and supporting the BKA in designing the questionnaire.
Prof. Michael Bosnjak is the Director of ZPID and is a Professor of Psychological Research Methods at the University of Trier. He has more than 20 years of experience in data collection and survey methodology. He has been instrumental in setting up the GESIS Panel, a large-scale survey infrastructure at ZPID'S collaborative partner GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and he has published numerous articles on issues of survey data collection in high-ranking journals such as Public Opinion Quarterly, Social Science Computer Review, Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, and Survey Research Methods.
"I am very pleased to be able to contribute to creating an up-to-date database for this highly relevant social issue so that effective policy measures can be derived from it," says Prof. Bosnjak.
In recent years, an increasing number of requests have been made to the BMFSFJ to provide up-to-date figures on the incidence of violence in Germany. In 2004, the BMFSJ's most recent representative dark (i.e., unreported) figures on violence against women in Germany were published in its research report "Lebenssituation, Sicherheit und Gesundheit von Frauen in Deutschland" (Living situations, safety, and health of women in Germany). Violence against men will now be surveyed for the first time.