National Statistical

Earlier this year we announced we will be using newly-developed questions to measure domestic abuse in the Crime Survey for England and Wales. These statistics have now been reinstated as accredited official statistics by the Office for Statistics Regulation. Meghan Elkin explains the significance of this and, as the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence begins, the value of the newly published domestic abuse statistics.

The ONS has been improving domestic abuse questions in its crime survey to better reflect lived experiences of abuse victims and, ultimately, to improve outcomes and support for them. As explained in my blog earlier this year, given the importance and sensitivities of measuring domestic abuse, we ensured a rigorous approach to research and testing.

The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) has now reviewed our research, evaluation and estimates and published its report. That concludes that the estimates should now be reinstated as accredited official statistics.

In their letter, the OSR notes the ‘robustness’ of our approach and the value of these new questions, in particular as they ‘directly inform ONS’ new combined prevalence measure….as the primary metric for assessing progress towards the UK Government’s goal of halving violence against women and girls (VAWG) within a decade’.

Today we’ve published our first compendium of statistics which looks in detail at the information gathered from these new questions.

The crime survey estimated that approximately 3.8 million people (7.8%) aged 16 years and over experienced domestic abuse in the survey year ending (YE) March 2025. This equates to 2.2 million women and 1.5 million men.

There was no statistically significant change in the prevalence of domestic abuse experienced in the last year, compared with the previous year. And due to changes we’ve made to the questions, comparisons cannot be made prior to YE March 2024.

An estimated 1 in 4 (25.8%) people aged 16 years and over have experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16 years (equivalent to 12.5 million people). Split by sex, 29.6% of women and 21.8% of men have experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16 years (equivalent to 7.3 million and 5.2 million, respectively).

The compendium released today helps dig a little deeper into these figures. For example, for the first time estimates are now available separately for abuse by a current partner and abuse by someone who was an ex-partner at the time of the interview. And our statistics now better reflect lived experiences, for example, by capturing types of abuse not previously covered by the crime survey which also provides new estimates.

We have also expanded the questions on the impacts people experienced. We are now using these to create abuse scales, which I’ll come on to later.

A better definition of abuse

It is not possible to compare the estimates derived from new and old survey questions. However, for context to understand the impact of this improvement, the previous CSEW questions estimated that 1 in 5 people aged 16 years and over had experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16 years, for the survey year ending March 2024. Whereas the redeveloped questions (which include additional abuse types and behaviours) estimate equivalent figures of 1 in 4 for the same period.

Previously, health abuse was not captured by the survey. This includes anything from depriving a person of daily essentials, such as food and sleep, to forcing someone to terminate pregnancy or denying someone medical assistance. We included questions on health abuse because these behaviours are often experienced by people in controlling or coercive relationships.

Today’s figures from the crime survey show that approximately 0.3 million people (0.7%) aged 16 years and over experienced health abuse in the last year. The survey found no difference in the prevalence of health abuse between men and women.

We are now asking questions on marital status-related abuse which includes forced marriage and the prevention of marrying someone of your choice. The survey estimates approximately 72,000 people aged 16 years and over had experienced marital status-related abuse in the last year.

The value of survey data

The crime survey is our best measure of the prevalence of domestic abuse. We know many victims will be unwilling to disclose such experiences in the context of an in-home face-to-face personal interview. For this reason, our preferred measure of domestic abuse comes from the survey’s domestic abuse self-completion module.

We know that domestic abuse often isn’t reported to the police. The last time we asked victims of partner abuse about reporting to the police was in the YE March 2023 crime survey. This estimated that fewer than 1 in 5 (18.9%) victims of partner abuse in the last year reported the abuse to the police.

In total, the police recorded 816,493 domestic abuse-related crimes in England and Wales in year ending (YE) March 2025. This was a decrease, compared with the previous year (851,062). This is likely to reflect recent changes in police recording practices.

In May 2023, changes were made to the Home Office Counting Rules covering conduct crimes (stalking, harassment and coercive and controlling behaviour). The requirement to record two crimes, reported at the same time by a victim involving the same perpetrator, when one of them was a conduct crime was removed. However, the police continue to investigate all offences.

This has led to a reduction in offences often associated with conduct crimes, particularly for malicious communications, and an increase in offences such as stalking and harassment. The impact of these changes on statistics is difficult to measure as compliance in crime recording in this area has been inconsistent across policing. Therefore, caution should be taken when comparing domestic abuse-related police recorded data with previous years.

New insight into how domestic abuse varies

For those who have experienced abuse since the age of 16 years, our questions now ask about a wide range of impacts people have experienced as a result of that abuse. This means the new questions provide the opportunity to combine behaviours experienced and the impacts of the abuse to show the spectrum of victims based on their experiences since the age of 16 years.

We are calling the resulting estimates from combining behaviours and impacts “abuse scales”. Producing these will help policy makers and victim services in understanding types of victims and developing policies and services to best meet their needs.

Today we’ve published a research article which presents abuse scales for the first time, including the method behind them and resulting estimates. Our initial research shows prevalence rates of domestic abuse, partner abuse and family abuse since the age of 16 years were highest for victims who experienced lower numbers of abusive behaviours and impacts. Full details and breakdowns by sex can be found in the article.

We will work with users to gather feedback to help us to develop these scales and provide the support needed to understand the estimates.