Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic – A landmark piece of legislation tabled before the national legislature, formally named the Organic Law on Comprehensive Response to Violence against Women and widely referred to as the “Mirabal Law,” sets out a sweeping institutional framework to standardize data collection and cross-agency coordination for addressing gender-based violence across the Caribbean nation. The draft bill assigns the country’s National Statistics Office (ONE) the lead technical role in overseeing a dedicated, nationwide specialized statistical ecosystem focused exclusively on tracking all forms of violence targeted at women. Under the proposed rules, the ONE will partner closely with the Ministry of Women and more than 20 other public sector bodies that generate relevant official datasets, to build a unified workflow for aggregating, cross-referencing, analyzing, and publicly releasing verified gender violence data. A core function of this new system will be rolling out uniform, standardized categories, classification frameworks, and shared data variables across all participating government agencies, eliminating current inconsistencies that make cross-departmental datasets impossible to compare accurately. All published data will be fully anonymized to protect victim privacy, and aligned with both domestic statistical governance rules and global international data standards for gender-based violence tracking. The legislative proposal also enshrines a mandatory requirement for the ONE to administer a comprehensive National Survey on Violence against Women at minimum every five years. This recurring population-level study is designed to capture not just formally reported cases, but also the large volume of unreported incidents that have long been hidden from official public records, to map the full prevalence, distinct characteristics, and long-term evolving trends of gender violence across the country. All findings from these surveys will be proactively disclosed to the public, and used as the evidence base to draft, refine, and track the performance of targeted public intervention policies. Complementing the statistical infrastructure, the bill will formalize a permanent national inter-agency coordination body led by the Ministry of Women, which will bring together over 20 government entities to synchronize prevention, support, and law enforcement responses to gender-based violence, and conduct ongoing monitoring of policy outcomes. The legislation bears the name of Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa Mirabal, three iconic Dominican anti-dictatorship activists who were assassinated by the brutal Trujillo authoritarian regime on November 25, 1960. That date has since been designated globally as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, making the proposed law a direct national tribute to the Mirabal sisters’ legacy of fighting for justice and gender equity.
Mirabal Law proposes national statistical system on violence against women
