Are women more safe today in England and Wales than they were in the past – or less? What the evidence shows
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of violence against women and girls that we see in the news on a daily basis. Horrific cases such as that of survivor Gisèle Pelicot can make us wonder how such distressing crimes can still be happening.
Violence against women and girls accounts for almost 20% of all recorded crime in England and Wales. That’s more than one million crimes a year. At least one in every 12 women will be a victim in any given year. Child sexual abuse and exploitation crimes, which are more likely to affect girls, increased more than 400% between 2013 and 2022. Over one in four adult homicides is domestic related (partner, ex-partner or family member).
This is why police chiefs have declared violence against women and girls a national threat – on a par with terrorism.
The government strategy, published in December 2025, pledges to halve violence against women over the next decade. While this is the first time that an actual target has been put on reducing such violence, efforts to improve criminal justice responses have been increasing since the mid-1990s. But are women today any safer or freer now than they were back then?
While recorded increases in crimes such as rape and sexual assault are probably due to victims being more likely to report and improvements in police recording them, there are other factors at play. Certainly, more types of violence and abuse are crimes now – such as coercive and controlling behaviour (since 2015) and the sharing (or threat of) of intimate images without consent (since 2024).
Some forms of violence do appear to have decreased since self-report surveys began in the 1990s. As social attitudes have become less tolerant of physical forms of male violence against women, those physical acts of violence have reduced. Physical violence from a partner is now less common than emotional abuse, economic abuse, domestic sexual assault or domestic stalking. (Though physical violence remains high in domestic abuse by family members).
Likewise, the oft-quoted statistic that two women per week are killed by a partner or ex-partner is now out of date. The number is now around 90 per year – although that will be of little consolation to the family and friends of those who have died.
As well as new criminal offences such as coercive and controlling behaviour, there is now greater recognition of some forms of abuse such as economic abuse (controlling a partner’s finances or financial freedom). However, the numbers quickly quell any optimism of an increased awareness leading to a corresponding reduction in abuse. The number of female domestic abuse victims who kill themselves is now thought to be even higher than the number killed by their partners.
Non-fatal strangulation or suffocation, a criminal offence in its own right since 2021, has skyrocketed with nearly 50,000 offences recorded by the police last year. This is in part due to the normalisation of “choking” in mainstream pornography. Choking porn is now itself set to become a criminal offence.
Read more: Sexual strangulation has become popular – but that doesn’t mean it’s wanted
New forms of violence
We often focus on whether violence and abuse is reducing – can we measure it and can we halve it? But the reality of the problem is that it is constantly changing. In my latest book I argue that violence and abuse “shapeshifts”.
We would never have imagined 30 years ago that the new mobile phones we were so impressed with would be used as a weapon of abuse, or that technological advances could “nudify” a women in an instant and be shared with the world.
Violence against women is not static. It is essential to get ahead of the problem. We now have a strong understanding of what survivors need. The resources to provide them is another matter – particularly for women with insecure immigration status and no recourse to public funds.
However, we still have a huge knowledge gap on how to actually reduce violence – by half or otherwise.
To be serious about halving violence against women we must get ahead of the problem in terms of prevention – starting with children and young people. Child-to-child violence now accounts for more than half of child sexual abuse offences reported to the police. We need to invest more effectively in better interventions and research these to understand more about how to stop perpetrators from continuing their abuse including in new relationships.
A well-functioning criminal justice system feels a long way off, with average rape trials now routinely taking more than two years to reach court. And outdated gender norms and misconceptions about rape still stop women from getting justice in court.
The argument for prevention – stopping violence against women before it starts or at the earliest opportunity to intervene if it has – has never been clearer. These parts of the strategy require a bolder focus if we are to actually see levels of violence against women start to fall.
Nicole Westmarland currently receives funding from the ESRC, Home Office and Cabinet Office. She is a trustee of Darlington and Co. Durham RSACC.