ABSTRACT
Committees of experts decide what to count, how to categorize, and how to deal with missing data. Violence against women was long ignored and when activists began to focus on the problem in the 1970s and 1980s, a first step was counting how often it took place. Any system of counting requires substantial interpretive work in deciding what to count, how to categorize it, and what to call what is measured. It is important to peer into the black box of measurements such as social indicators to see how they are made and to what extent they distort and misrepresent reality. The focus on what can be counted and what has already been counted leaves many important issues out, such as the social climate of a school, the contribution of natural resources to GDP, or the array of social conditions within which a person becomes caught in a slave-like condition.
