A RISE IN ABUSE
Women are more likely to be domestic abuse victims than men and the gap is growing
DOMESTIC abuse is on the rise among women, new figures have revealed. The latest findings from the Crime Survey for England and Wales show that 8.4% of women aged between 16 and 59 said they’d experienced domestic abuse in the year to March 2019.
That was up from the 7.9% of women who said the same the year before.
Although domestic abuse prevalence has trended downwards since it was first recorded in 2004/05, the rate for this year is at a five-year high.
At the same time, 4.2% of men aged between 16 and 59 said they’d experienced domestic abuse in the year to March 2019.
That was the exact same proportion as the year before.
The charity Women’s Aid offers a definition of domestic abuse.
They say “[It is] an incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive, threatening, degrading and violent behaviour, including sexual violence, in the majority of cases by a partner or ex-partner, but also by a family member or carer.
“It is very common.
“In the vast majority of cases it is experienced by women and is perpetrated by men”.
The figures also looked at characteristics of those who said they’d experienced domestic abuse.
Women were more than twice as likely (6.4%) as men (3.1%) to say they’d experienced abuse from their partner. They were also nearly twice as likely (2.8%) to have experienced abuse from their family as men (1.5%).
The most common age range for women to experience any form of domestic abuse was 20-24.
Some 15.1% of women in this age category said they’d experienced it in the year to March 2019.
The most common age range for men, on the other hand, was in the 16-19 age category.
Some 6.5% of men in this age group said they’d experienced domestic abuse.
The data relies on respondents of the survey self-reporting domestic abuse.
Therefore it may well be that more people have experienced domestic abuse than said they had.