One in eight women victims of domestic abuse, stalking or sexual assault, new figures show
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), around 3.2 million women aged over 16 were victims of at least one of these crimes between March 2024 and 2025.
It is the first time the ONS has grouped domestic abuse, sexual assault and stalking figures together, using data collected as part of the Crime Survey for England and Wales.
The ONS hope this will mean it can more accurately estimate of the prevalence of domestic abuse, sexual assault and stalking against women and girls.
The government will also use the figures to track its efforts on tackling violence against women and girls (VAWG).
The figures, released Thursday, show estimated 5.1 million people aged 16 and over in England and Wales are likely to have experienced one of these crime types. Of those, 3.2 million are women and nearly 2.0 million are men.
This equates to about one in 12 men being victims of at least one of the crime types over the same period.
Reacting to the figures, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: "We have already started to put domestic abuse specialists in 999 control rooms, invested in major new perpetrator programmes, and why we are publishing a transformative cross-government VAWG strategy in September, because everybody has a right to feel safe on our streets.'
Women's Aid welcomed the ONS grouping the data together, saying it was a step towards a better overview of these crimes.
Sarah Davidge, head of research and evaluation at Women's Aid, said the move "reflects the Government's commitment to ending VAWG", but added the data does not show the number of times each person was victimised.She added: "We know that women encounter higher rates of repeat victimisation, are more likely to be subject to coercive and controlling behaviour and be seriously harmed or killed than male victims."Therefore, prevalence measures can underestimate the gender asymmetry of these crimes."
Elsewhere, ONS data published on Thursday shows people aged 16 and over experienced 9.4 million incidents of crime in the year to March 2025, up from 8.8 million in the previous 12 months.
The rise is mainly due to a 31% rise in fraud, which accounts for 4.2 million incidents and is the highest estimate since fraud was first measured in the survey in 2016/17.
The figures also show that offences of shoplifting and theft from the person remain at record highs, while homicides are at their lowest level for more than a decade.
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