Your voice matters
This confidential survey will help to shape policies and services to deal with sexual abuse in Ireland
This survey, which is being undertaken by the Central Statistics Office (CSO), is about a range of experiences that you may or may not have had throughout your lifetime, which may include sexual harassment, stalking and other types of sexual abuse. You can complete the survey yourself online with instructions included to help you along the way.
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) is Ireland’s national statistics office and our purpose is to impartially collect, analyse and make available statistics about Ireland, our people and society. We collect data under the Statistics Act 1993 to provide official statistics to inform decision making across all aspects of Irish society. We run several household and business surveys, as well as the census, to collect and report on statistics about all aspects of life.
It is important that everyone sampled takes part; participants are chosen at random from the population that is 18 years or older. This survey will assist government departments, agencies and others in making policy decisions about sexual harassment, stalking and other types of sexual abuse in the country. No one will be identifiable from the information we collect. All of the information collected is treated with strict confidentiality and anonymised. This means that you or your household will not be identifiable from any information you provide.
It is extremely important that we collect information both from people who have experienced sexual harassment, stalking and other types of abuse and from those who have not. It will provide data on a topic that hasn’t been examined since 2002 when the Sexual Assault and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) report was published. It is important that there is current data on this topic to facilitate informed decisions about policies and required services.
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) is Ireland’s statistical agency and carries out surveys regularly. It is impossible to ask everyone in the country to take part so the CSO design sample surveys, which are sent to people at random. This is a sample survey and you have been chosen randomly from the population to take part. Your participation will represent others who haven’t been sampled which is why it’s so important that you take part, no matter what your experience might be.
The CSO collects contact details from a wide range of sources, both from social surveys and statistical data sources made available to us under the Statistics Act, 1993. All data collected and used by the CSO is stored securely and is only used for the purpose of producing national and international statistics.
It is impossible to ask everyone in the country to take part, so we randomly select people from the population to complete the survey and they represent everybody else. We cannot accept volunteers to fill out the survey as it will affect the statistical methodology behind our sampling process. If you would like to speak with somebody about your experiences, contact details for a number of services are listed below.
This survey is voluntary, you don’t have to take part but your voice matters. We need as many people as possible to take part to ensure the data that is collected represents everyone. We can’t survey everyone in the country, this is why you have been chosen at random as part of a sample survey. If you have any questions about the survey, you can call us at 021 453 5110 or you can email us at sop@cso.ie. You can also find more information about the survey here on our website or on our social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.
In December 2017, at the request of the Minister for Justice and Equality, the CSO took part in a working group whose role was to consider the availability of data in relation to sexual abuse and to make recommendations regarding future requirements. The result was a consensus on the need for a comprehensive national survey on the prevalence of sexual abuse in Ireland. The CSO is Ireland’s national statistics office and our purpose is to impartially collect, analyse and make available statistics about Ireland, our people and society. We collect data under the Statistics Act 1993 to provide official statistics to inform decision making across all aspects of Irish society. At European level these statistics provide an accurate picture of Ireland’s economic and social performance and enable comparisons between Ireland and other countries.
As Ireland's national statistical office, the CSO’s role is to support research and public policy by producing impartial and robust data reflecting Ireland’s economy, people and society. There is a breadth and depth of statistical expertise in the CSO, but the CSO is also cognisant of the particularly sensitive nature of data on sexual abuse and the unique challenges associated with its collection. As a result, during the design phase of the survey the CSO worked closely with key stakeholders in the area of sexual abuse, experts in law, psychology and language and also our international colleagues in other National Statistical Institutes with experience in this area.
We want to gather your data so don’t worry if you cannot do the survey online. If you want to discuss other ways to complete the survey you can call us at 021 453 5110. We can discuss either getting an interviewer to call to your door to explain how to log on or possibly help you with the survey. If you are still uncomfortable with that, we can provide you with a paper survey.
We analyse the data and publish it by age group, gender, county but it is anonymised. Nobody is identifiable from this data. We never share your data with any other agency or government department and once published we delete data that we don’t require.
Confidentiality is a core value of the CSO. The CSO will never share your information with another company, business or Government Department or body. We only use your data for statistical purposes. That means we remove all identifying information such as your name and your specific address. We use broad information such as the general area where you live (e.g. Cork), your age and your sex and then aggregate this data so nobody is identifiable from the data provided.
It depends on your experiences, but we have timed it and we believe that, on average, it won’t take longer than 20 mins. As part of our commitment to the security of the data, you have only one opportunity to take part, so please ensure that you are able to complete the survey when you start the process.
If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this survey, help is available from the following national helplines or from local / regional helplines.
Learn about our data and confidentiality safeguards, and the steps we take to produce statistics that can be trusted by all.