Nearly 4.7 million adults in England and Wales experienced domestic abuse in the year to March 2026.
If that figure, published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), wasn’t bad enough, it’s up from 7.8% the previous year. The rise was driven by an increase in abuse by intimate partners.
The research, part of the Crime Survey for England and Wales, also estimated around one million adults had experienced sexual victimisation and 1.9 million had been stalked. In total, 5.4 million adults had been exposed to at least one of the three forms of abuse.
Women were more likely to be affected, with 12.8% experiencing domestic abuse, sexual victimisation or stalking, compared with 8.9% of men.
Meghan Elkin, head of crime statistics at the ONS, said: ‘While minor survey changes and the usual uncertainty around gathering data on this sensitive topic are likely to have affected these estimates, our assessment is that the rise in domestic abuse includes real change.
‘More data points are needed to further understand the uncertainty and what this tells us about trends in domestic abuse.’
The figures will be used to monitor the government’s pledge to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) by 2034.
Alice Russell-Harris, public affairs lead at Refuge, said: ‘The government has pledged to halve VAWG…by 2034, but latest domestic abuse data from the ONS tells a troubling story. This figure reflects what we sadly know is true at Refuge: domestic abuse is devastating and an unacceptable number of lives.
‘Domestic abuse often goes unseens and unreported, so these figures likely represent the tip of the iceberg.’
Farah Nazeer, chief executive of Women’s Aid, said a ‘staggering’ number of people had been affected by domestic abuse in the past year, adding that ‘if domestic abuse doesn’t affect us directly it will be affecting someone we know’.
Image: Windah Limbai/UnSplash
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