Gender-sensitive statistics should be used when entering data and recording in the Ministry of Interior

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The seminar on gender analysis in strategic planning and reporting in the police was held from March 12th to 14th, 2014 in the hotel Relax in Kovacica and gathered analysts from 27 police directorates in Serbia. Using group work as a teaching strategy and presenting exercises on specific examples the participants had the opportunity to analyze possibilities for applying gender-sensitive statistics that is necessary  to be collected in order to reflect security needs of girls and boys, men and women.

Basic terms: gender-sensitive statistics

During the seminar the participants had the opportunity to learn more about gender-sensitive statistics which represents quantitative statistical information on the disparities and inequalities between women and men. In the context of security problems, gender-sensitive statistics may indicate proportion of women and men deaths due to road traffic injuries, the number of theft victims by gender, gender trends in suicide etc. 

„Employees in the Ministry of Interior  should regularly use gender-sensitive statistics since it is of utmost importance for planning and analysis of security phenomena“, said Jana Kačarević from Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia.

{image2}Swedish example of good practice in collecting and recording of data

Bz analyzing available data on men and women in the criminal justice system in Sweden, the participants concluded that the reported crimes should be desegregated by gender, age, place of execution and in relation to whether the offense is committed within the family or not. Sweden has a practice to cross-classify data by type of relationship (kinship) of the offender and the victim, which is not the case in Serbia. There is also a unified registration system at the national level. Police record all reported offences into the registration system wheares offense can also be reported over the police website.

„Given the fact that the database system is unified for the whole country, one can easily spot the prevalence and trends of certain crimes in different parts of the country. Analysts are responsible for analyzing these trends and communicating information to the higher ranks in order to organize resources in the best way and find the causes of the existing security problems“, explained Hans Järvestam from the Swedish National Police Board.

Improve data records system in the Ministry of Interior

According to Law on police, data on reported offences and persons suspected of offences and victims may be used for statistical and analytical purposes in the Ministry of Interior. However, data collection in the MoI is not gender sensitive, which means that it does not take into account gender differences in the crime records.

„Although some data in the MoI are gender segragated there is no obligation of production of gender-sensitive parameters. That means that the quality of the data is unsatisfactory and does not meet the standards of the European Union“, concluded one of the participants.

In Serbia, there is no record on how many times the police was contacted for certain criminal offences. In comparison to such practice, in Sweden and the UK it is easy to record the trend mentioned above. The participants stressed that there are two ways in the MoI of data collecting: automatic and non automatic. The latter is problematic, since data are not part of the system as with the automatic one and can be easily abused by a third party. What is more, having data as such makes it impossible to analyze them. This is the reason why analysts think that the system should be improved by using more gender-sensitive parameters, which would enchance data collection and recording in the MoI.