Almost one in three women in the European Union has experienced physical violence, threats, or sexual violence since the age of 15. That is roughly 50 million women. These are the findings of the latest EU survey on gender-based violence, based on interviews with more than 114,000 women.

What makes this figure alarming is not only its scale, but its persistence. Ten years earlier, the first EU-wide survey found the same pattern. As the director of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights put it: “a decade later, we continue to witness the same shocking levels of violence.”

In a recent article in Nature Communications, I examined whether Target 5.2 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals – which aims to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls by 2030 – is realistic.

The uncomfortable answer is no, not by 2030, and not at the current pace.

The EU statistic is strikingly consistent with what we see globally. The World Health Organization describes violence against women as a public health problem of “pandemic proportions”. Its latest estimates, published in 2025, suggest that 30.4% of women worldwide – approximately 840 million women – have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.

These numbers have remained largely unchanged for more than two decades. The WHO describes recent reductions as minimal, too slow and grossly insufficient. Even this may understate the real scale, as many women do not disclose violence in surveys, and some forms of abuse (psychological violence, coercive control, economic abuse, online harassment) are poorly captured........

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