Violence Against Women Statistics in UK 2026 | Key Facts

Violence Against Women in the UK 2026

An estimated 3.2 million women in England and Wales experienced domestic abuse, sexual assault, or stalking in the year ending March 2025, according to a new combined measure the Office for National Statistics (ONS) now uses as the government’s official benchmark for tracking violence against women and girls. That works out to 12.8% of all women aged 16 and over, compared to 8.4% of men, and the figure underpins the current Labour government’s stated mission to halve violence against women and girls within a decade.

This report covers the full current picture of violence against women statistics in the UK for 2026: domestic abuse prevalence and police recording, sexual assault and rape statistics, femicide and domestic homicide data, teenage relationship abuse, the economic cost, and the government’s current legislative response. All figures come from the ONS, the Home Office, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the House of Commons Library.

Key Violence Against Women Statistics for the UK in 2026

Source: Office for National Statistics (ONS), Domestic Abuse in England and Wales Overview, November 2025; ONS, Developing a Combined Measure of Domestic Abuse, Sexual Assault and Stalking, July 2025; House of Commons Library, “Violence Against Women and Girls in 2025.”

Domestic abuse prevalence has stayed essentially flat. The 3.8 million people (7.8%) who experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2025 shows no statistically significant change from the previous year, despite years of expanded support services and public awareness campaigns. The newer combined measure — tracking domestic abuse, sexual assault, and stalking together — found 10.6% of all adults, or 5.1 million people, were affected, with women experiencing this combination at roughly one and a half times the rate of men.

Police recording and prosecution data moved in different directions. Recorded domestic abuse-related crimes fell to 816,493 in the year ending March 2025, down from 851,062 the year before — a decline the ONS attributes explicitly to changes in police recording practices, not necessarily fewer actual incidents. Prosecutions, meanwhile, rose to 54,987 from 51,183, suggesting cases that do reach the criminal justice system are being pursued somewhat more often even as raw recorded crime figures dropped. The End Violence Against Women Coalition has specifically flagged concern that changes to the underlying Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) questions may understate the gendered nature of domestic abuse, pointing to the UK’s femicide rate as evidence the harm remains disproportionately concentrated among women.

Domestic Abuse Statistics UK 2026

Source: ONS, Domestic Abuse in England and Wales Overview, November 2025; Women’s Aid; National Centre for Domestic Violence.

Domestic abuse is defined broadly under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, covering not just physical violence but coercive control, economic abuse, and other repeated patterns of behaviour used to maintain power in a relationship. The lifetime prevalence figures illustrate the scale beyond any single-year snapshot: 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 to 7 men will experience domestic abuse at some point in their lives, and roughly one-third of 2025’s victims were aged 16 to 24, indicating the abuse frequently begins early in adult relationships rather than emerging only later in life.

The gap between the 3.8 million estimated victims and the 816,493 police-recorded crimes reflects domestic abuse’s well-documented status as a substantially under-reported crime, with support organisations estimating fewer than 1 in 5 victims report their experience to police at all. The ONS itself cautions that police recorded crime data should not be treated as a measure of true prevalence, precisely because it captures only the fraction of cases that are reported and subsequently recorded as domestic abuse-related.

Sexual Violence and Rape Statistics UK 2026

Source: ONS, Crime in England and Wales: Year Ending March 2025; Crown Prosecution Service; Home Office Crime Outcomes Data.

Sexual assault prevalence has climbed over the past decade when measured on a comparable basis: among 16-to-59-year-olds, the share reporting sexual assault rose from 1.7% in 2015 to 2.4% in the 2025 survey. Whether this reflects a genuine rise in offending or improved willingness among victims to disclose experiences to survey interviewers is a question researchers cannot fully resolve from survey data alone, though both explanations likely play some role.

The gap between reported rapes and successful prosecution remains stark. England and Wales recorded a historic high of 70,330 rapes in 2022, yet only 2,223 cases resulted in a charge that same year — a charge rate that has driven sustained criticism of the criminal justice system’s handling of sexual offences. Compounding this, roughly 31% of all sexual offence cases in the most recent data were closed specifically because the victim did not support further police action against a suspect, a pattern that researchers and victim advocates link to the trauma of the reporting and court process itself rather than any doubt about whether an offence occurred. For a broader view of how sexual offences fit into the UK’s overall crime picture, see our Crime Statistics in UK coverage.

Domestic Homicide and Femicide Statistics UK 2026

Source: ONS, Homicide in England and Wales; Domestic Homicide Project research, Homicide Rate in UK coverage.

Homicide is where the gendered pattern of domestic abuse becomes starkest. While men make up the clear majority of all homicide victims overall — 414 male victims versus 156 female victims in the year ending March 2024 — the circumstances of those deaths diverge sharply by sex. 42% of adult female homicide victims were killed by a current or former partner, compared to just 3% of male victims, confirming that intimate partner violence is overwhelmingly the leading context in which women, specifically, are killed. A broader ONS measure counting all domestic abuse-related deaths, which includes suspected suicides following abuse alongside direct homicides, recorded 262 deaths in the same year, of which 98 were suspected suicides linked to domestic abuse rather than direct killings.

Prior police contact is common in these cases. Research from the Domestic Homicide Project found four in five perpetrators of domestic homicide were already known to police before the killing, and three in five were specifically known for prior domestic abuse incidents — a pattern that has fed directly into policy discussions about earlier intervention and risk assessment. For a fuller picture of how these gendered homicide patterns compare across the wider UK homicide data, see our Homicide Rate in UK coverage.

The Economic Cost of Violence Against Women UK 2026

Source: GOV.UK, “Freedom from Violence and Abuse: A Cross-Government Strategy,” 2025; Refuge; Walby, S., “The Cost of Domestic Violence,” Women and Equality Unit, Home Office.

Cost estimates vary considerably depending on scope and methodology, and readers should treat these as measuring somewhat different things rather than as conflicting figures. The government’s own current cross-government strategy places the cost of domestic abuse for adults specifically at £89.3 billion for 2025/26, a substantially higher figure than older, narrower estimates like Refuge’s £23 billion figure, reflecting both inflation and a more comprehensive accounting of costs including lost economic output, health and social care spending, and criminal justice system expenditure. A separate, broader estimate covering the full range of violence against women and girls — not domestic abuse alone — puts the annual cost closer to £66 billion, illustrating how the specific crimes counted meaningfully changes the resulting total.

Teenage Relationship Abuse Statistics UK 2026

Source: Crime Survey for England and Wales, 2024 edition; ONS, Domestic Abuse Victim Characteristics, England and Wales; Connaught Law VAWG Statistics, 2026.

Abuse within teenage relationships is strikingly common, with the Crime Survey for England and Wales finding that 49% of 13-to-17-year-olds in an intimate relationship experienced some form of violent or controlling behaviour, and 41% of girls aged 14 to 17 in a relationship specifically reported sexual violence from a partner. These figures have driven growing attention toward relationship education in schools, given that patterns of controlling or violent behaviour established in adolescence frequently continue into adult relationships if left unaddressed.

The overall scale of recorded VAWG-flagged crime has grown substantially in recent years, rising 37% between 2018 and 2022, though as with other crime categories in this article, that increase reflects some combination of genuinely rising incidents, improved police recording practices, and greater victim willingness to report. On average, a domestic abuse-related call is made to UK police roughly every 30 seconds, underscoring the sheer daily operational scale this single crime category represents for police forces across England and Wales.

Stalking Statistics and Victim Support Services UK 2026

Source: ONS, Developing a Combined Measure of Domestic Abuse, Sexual Assault and Stalking, July 2025; Refuge.

Stalking is now formally tracked alongside domestic abuse and sexual assault in the ONS’s headline combined measure, reflecting recognition that these three crime types frequently overlap and that measuring them separately understated the full scale of gender-based victimisation. The 0.7 percentage point rise in the combined measure between the two most recent survey years cannot currently be confirmed as statistically significant given limitations in how the estimate is constructed, though the ONS has indicated the YE March 2026 release will use an improved, more directly comparable methodology going forward.

Demand for support services has historically spiked around periods of acute social stress. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline recorded a 65% increase in calls between April and June 2020, during the UK’s initial COVID-19 lockdown period, a surge widely cited by researchers and service providers as evidence that abuse often intensifies when victims face reduced opportunities to leave the household or seek outside support. This historical spike continues to inform how support organisations and the government plan capacity for helpline and refuge services during any future periods of extended social restriction or economic strain.

Regional and Demographic Variation in Violence Against Women UK 2026

Source: ONS, Domestic Abuse Victim Characteristics, England and Wales; Telford & Wrekin Council, VAWG Statistics compilation.

The gendered asymmetry in domestic abuse extends well beyond raw prevalence figures. Across recorded domestic abuse cases, 93% of defendants are male while 84% of victims are female, and women who experience domestic abuse are consistently more likely than male victims to face repeat victimisation, physical injury, and sexual violence as part of the same abusive relationship. This pattern — women facing not just abuse, but abuse that is more frequent, more severe, and more likely to include a sexual violence component — is central to why the government and advocacy organisations continue to frame this as a gendered violence issue requiring targeted policy responses, rather than treating domestic abuse as a gender-neutral phenomenon affecting men and women in equivalent ways.

Taken together, the CSEW survey data, police recorded crime figures, and Home Office prosecution statistics referenced throughout this article each capture a different slice of the same underlying picture — self-reported prevalence, formally recorded incidents, and criminal justice outcomes respectively — and readers comparing figures across different reports should check which of these three measurement layers a given statistic is drawn from before assuming two numbers are directly comparable.

Source: GOV.UK; Crime and Policing Bill 2025; ONS combined measure methodology, July 2025.

The current government has adopted halving violence against women and girls within a decade as a formal, headline mission, with the ONS’s new combined domestic abuse, sexual assault, and stalking measure serving as the official yardstick against which progress will be tracked year over year. Legislatively, the Crime and Policing Bill 2025 introduces new Domestic Abuse Protection Orders designed to give police and courts stronger, faster tools to restrict an abuser’s contact with a victim, alongside enhanced stalking protection measures responding to long-standing criticism that stalking has historically been under-prioritised relative to other forms of gender-based violence.

Whether this decade-long target proves achievable remains an open question given the flat prevalence trend documented in the most recent data — the 7.8% domestic abuse rate for YE March 2025 showed no statistically significant improvement over the prior year. For international comparison on how domestic violence prevalence and state-level patterns compare in another major country, see our Domestic Violence by State in US coverage, which documents similarly gendered patterns in severe physical violence prevalence across the United States.

Disclaimer: This research report is compiled from publicly available sources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is given as to the completeness or reliability of the information. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions, losses, or damages of any kind arising from the use of this report.

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