Women’s Aid respond to updated Crime Survey for England and Wales questions from the Office of National Statistics

Women’s Aid said:

“We are pleased that this year the Office for National Statistics will be including a new set of domestic abuse questions in the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). We have supported the redevelopment of these questions, in partnership with the University of Bristol, Respect and the College of Policing, and in consultation with diverse survivors and key stakeholders, including Imkaan. The CSEW provides critical data on domestic abuse. It does not rely on victim-survivors reporting domestic abuse to the police, instead estimates are generated from a general survey of people aged 16 and over resident in households in England and Wales every year. The CSEW has always been at the cutting edge of survey development, however Women’s Aid has for many years been concerned that the questions in the survey have failed to adequately capture the lived experience of victim-survivors of domestic abuse, including failing to capture the continuous nature of abuse, the context in which the abuse occurs and the impacts of the abuse. As a result, the questions did not adequately capture coercive and controlling behaviour, and the results were likely to underestimate the gender asymmetry of domestic abuse.

The new questions will provide an updated headline prevalence estimate of the number of people experiencing domestic abuse in the past year. In addition, the new questions will also provide insight into victim-survivors’ experiences of domestic abuse since the age of 16, including detailed profiles of which victim-survivors are experiencing the highest impact and highest harm forms of abuse. Whilst the headline measure will better capture some experiences of abuse, it will be based on the experience of particular behaviours, without situating these experiences within the context and impact of the behaviour.

It is therefore essential that the headline measure be read together with the detailed abuse profiles, which will provide insight into who is doing what to whom. Extensive research has demonstrated that women are not only more likely to experience domestic abuse, but more likely to be subject to coercive control, repeat victimisation and be seriously harmed or killed, through abuse that is primarily perpetrated by men. In addition, it is particularly important to understand that men do not experience domestic abuse as part of embedded, structural inequalities against their sex. For women, however, domestic abuse is deeply rooted in inequalities between women and men. It is also important to consider how other forms of inequality intersect with sex inequality to affect a woman’s experiences of domestic abuse. Structural inequalities also cause the barriers and discrimination often faced in accessing support and justice by Black and minoritised victim survivors, LGBT+ victim survivors, D/deaf and disabled victim-survivors and older and teen victim-survivors. Structural inequalities are manipulated by perpetrators, as they strive for power and control. By understanding not only prevalence but impact, and how this is affecting different groups of the population, we will be able to identify to what extent policies and practice are either reducing or exacerbating experiences of domestic abuse, and in particular for whom, so that we can develop targeted and meaningful interventions.

We urge on-going caution in over-reliance on single national datasets, noting that the Crime Survey will still underestimate prevalence of Violence Against Women and Girls and that this is disproportionately the case for Black and minoritised women due to the structural inequalities that they experience, and emphasise the importance of a holistic approach to measuring progress to ending VAWG.

We also welcome the ONS’s work on developing improved statistics on the experiences of domestic abuse of children and young people, and look forward to working together to ensure that the experiences of all victim-survivors are represented in the data.”