Over a third of domestic abuse victims are men

SAY the words domestic abuse and most people will imagine a female victim.

But official statistics yesterday revealed hundreds of thousands of men also suffer violence at home.

Data compiled by the Office for National Statistics showed that more than a third of victims are men.

Around 1.9million people aged 16 to 59 experienced domestic violence in the year to March.

Some 713,000 – or 36 per cent – were males who reported suffering physical or emotional abuse. The number of female victims was 1.2million.

Domestic abuse includes psychological cruelty, sexual assault or stalking by a relation – most often a partner.

Campaigners said men assaulted by their partners were often ignored by police, saw their attackers go free and had fewer refuges to flee to than women.

John Mays, of Parity, a group which fights for equal rights for men and women, said: ‘Male victims are often hidden to the authorities.

‘It is often assumed that violence is a one-way street – men attacking women. But these figures show that is not the case.’

The figures were taken from the annual Crime Survey for England and Wales, which conducts face-to-face interviews with 40,000 people to glean their experiences of offences.

The domestic abuse report, published yesterday, said the true scale of the issue was not known to the authorities. It said: ‘A large proportion of these victims would not have reported their abuse to the police.’

Only 1.1million reports of abuse were recorded by police, showing that many victims never speak out, while just 488,000 of those reports were logged as crimes, and fewer than half resulted in an arrest. There were some 93,590 prosecutions for domestic abuse, of which 76 per cent – around 71,000 – secured a conviction.

Around one in ten women aged 16 to 19 were victims of domestic abuse last year compared with 7 per cent of males. Women also accounted for 70 per cent of 454 domestic homicides recorded last year.

The report pulls together data from the police, the government and victim support groups. Katie Ghose, chief executive of domestic abuse charity Wom- en’s Aid, said: ‘Domestic abuse by its very nature, hidden behind closed doors, is hard to capture in statistics alone.

‘ Survivors often do not involve official bodies as it takes great courage to report abuse to the police.’

Louisa Rolfe, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for domestic abuse, said: ‘The figures show that we are improving the way that police, prosecutors and wider society understand and deal with cases of domestic abuse.’

The ONS said its analysis of the figures indicates a gradual downward trend in levels of domestic abuse from almost 2.8million incidents of domestic violence a year ago.

Alexa Bradley, from the ONS, said: ‘Domestic abuse is a particularly difficult problem to tackle, not least because victims may be reluctant to report abuse or to support action against their abusers.’

Research has shown that 30 per cent – or five million – women and 16 per cent of men, around 2.5million, experience domestic abuse during their lives.

In a stinging report last March, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary accused police of letting down victims of abuse and failing to send officers to domestic incidents. It said some forces ‘were too often putting vulnerable people at serious risk of harm’.

‘Often hidden to authorities’