By Parliament of Victoria, . Legislative Assembly Legal and Social Issues Committee  

There is no single source of information that tells us about the profile and volume of people who use family violence in Victoria—or one single way to build our understanding of this cohort. Data is collected and held in multiple places and used for different purposes—including risk assessment and management, policy development, service planning, research and evaluation activities. Inquiry stakeholders identified consistent barriers to the collection, sharing and use of data about people who use family violence—all of which contribute to the barriers of achieving a full understanding of this cohort. This report’s recommendations seek to address these. Consistent barriers identified by stakeholders were: • system silos and data fragmentation—many sectors operate in data silos, making it challenging to see all the services someone is using and tracking their journey through sectors and multiple relationships. Data can also be fragmented within an organisation because they may be using multiple, different and unaligned databases. • data accuracy and reliability—several factors contribute to this, including inconsistent data collection standards, bias in data collection, and data collection not always being meaningful or what is needed. Collecting inaccurate or incomplete data about diversity also contributes, as does the underreporting of family violence. • organisational capacity and databases—data quality is impacted by the high level of administrative burden, and may be impacted by staff resources and capabilities. Outdated or onerous databases can add to the administrative burden, especially when the data comes in different formats that are difficult to analyse or share.  

East Melbourne Victoria: Parliament of Victoria,  Legislative Assembly Legal and Social Issues Committee , 2025. 318p.

By Guillermo Vázquez del Mercado, Luis Félix and Gerardo Carballo

Extortion is one of the main crimes that negatively affect citizen security in the Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) and, to a lesser extent, Costa Rica and Panama. Given the widespread presence of this crime in the region, the availability, relevance and reliability of data on extortion are essential to understand its magnitude, as well as to develop evidence-based public policies to contain it and build community resilience. However, unlike for other crimes such as homicides, public institutions in the countries of the region have not yet developed a specific methodology to collect, produce and disseminate up-to-date, reliable, relevant and high-quality data on extortion. This shortcoming hampers the analysis and research needed to measure the real magnitude of this crime and to generate evidence-based public policies. Furthermore, the dynamics of cooperation and territorial disputes between organized crime groups and the lack of knowledge about the variables involved in establishing an extortion rate are additional factors that merit further investigation, as they make it difficult for public institutions to measure extortion.1 This report analyzes the availability of public data on extortion and the transparency mechanisms for accessing it. To do so, the authors reviewed the availability and accessibility of data on extortion from official sources in the countries concerned, particularly the websites of national police forces and prosecutors' offices.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2021.