Data from “Female Victims – APAV Statistics 2022-2024,” released on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, reveals that between 2022 and 2024, APAV supported 36,489 female victims.
In 2022, 11,410 women were assisted, a number that increased to 12,398 in 2023 and 12,681 in 2024. During the same period, 70,179 crimes and forms of violence were recorded, marking an increase of over 10% between 2022 and 2024.
On average, APAV supported 20 women per day aged between 18 and 64, an age group that represents more than 60% of the victims. Furthermore, requests for assistance for 5,451 children and young people up to 17 years old were identified, as well as 3,765 women over 65 years old.
In statements to Lusa, Daniel Cotrim, technical advisor to the management of APAV, indicated that “there is no stability in the data.”
“There is still no trend of decline, which is what we would expect to happen,” he admitted.
Daniel Cotrim highlighted, on one hand, the prevalence of domestic violence crimes—constituting 85.4% of the 70,179 crimes reported to APAV—but also acknowledged the possibility of “people being more informed.”
“Women are more informed, more alert to their rights and the promotion of their rights and, therefore, want to break away from abusive relationships, violence in the context of intimacy, hence the requests for help they make to APAV and the increase in these requests,” he explained.
The average time between the first episode of violence and the request for help is between two and six years, demonstrating, according to Cotrim, a greater recognition of the severity of the situations. However, he warns that violence is becoming “more lethal and rapidly escalating,” quickly progressing from emotional and physical aggression to attempted murder.
For Daniel Cotrim, this violence is linked to the “spread in recent years of a kind of hate speech directed at women,” and of “some discourses heavily marked by misogyny, machismo, patriarchy.”
“This is also evident in the requests for help made and also in the age of the aggressors, increasingly younger, and the age of women victims, also increasingly younger,” he pointed out.
APAV data on the aggressor shows that in 70% of cases it is a man, aged between 26 and 55 (29.7%), who is or was in an intimate relationship with the victim (47.8%).
For him, the fact that the number of requests for help is not decreasing shows that violence against women “is an endemic issue,” “an internal phenomenon of Portuguese society that is linked to prejudiced and traditionalist perceptions and views of women and the roles of women and men.”
Daniel Cotrim noted that this violence is also present on social media, propagated by “false science, fake news.”
He argued, therefore, that the “State must intervene in prevention issues and in the issue of education,” emphasizing that social media content is “consumed predominantly by very young boys and girls” and that it is therefore necessary to work on emotional education and intelligence, positive relationships, and gender equality.
He further admitted that there is a danger of a rollback in women’s rights, asserting that this awareness brings the responsibility to “act for prevention” to avoid merely reacting “when this danger occurs.”
