Seven domestic violence reports in twenty-four hours. Four people detained. That is the police tally from one ordinary September night in Macedonia - a night with nothing special about it, no holiday, no trigger.

In Shtip, at 00:45, a 28-year-old was detained. He worked at a hospitality venue, argued with the staff, then attacked his partner - who worked at the same place. He went on to threaten the officer who came to intervene. In a village near Struga, at around 03:50, a 44-year-old was detained after a report that he and another family member had physically assaulted his wife. The same man, according to the police statement, "behaved aggressively toward police officers".

But it is the third case that tells the real story. In Kriva Palanka, on 18 September at 20:20, a 36-year-old was detained for violating a court order barring him from approaching or harassing his ex-wife. The order existed. A court had issued it. And the man physically attacked the woman anyway.

Paper against a fist

That is where the system falls apart - not at the police station. A restraining order is the strongest instrument the state offers a woman before the worst happens. If in practice that instrument amounts to a sheet of paper nobody monitors, then the woman who asked for it - and went through the entire procedure to get it - has a document, not protection.

Who checks whether the order is being respected? Nobody, evidently, except the victim herself - who finds out it has been violated at the moment she is already being hit. Only then do the police get involved, and only then will "appropriate charges follow once the incident is fully documented", the phrase the Interior Ministry uses to close all three cases.

Seven reports in one day works out to roughly 2,500 a year, if this was an average night. That is the number we have. The number we do not have - how many end with an order issued, how many of those orders are broken, and what penalty follows a breach - is the one that would show whether the state merely records violence or actually tries to stop it.