THE Office for National Statistics has just released its latest domestic abuse figures. The Crime Survey estimates that 3.8million people aged 16 and over, 7.8 per cent of the adult population, experienced domestic abuse in the year to March 2025. That is around one in 13 adults; 2.2million (9.1 per cent) of all women, and 1.5million (6.5 per cent) of all men. The overview can be found here, and the companion victim characteristics bulletin here.
Women are more likely to be recorded as victims. But men are not a rounding error. Around four in ten victims are male. The definition of ‘domestic abuse’ used by ONS is very broad. As well as violence it records emotional and economic abuse; it covers relatives, adult children and former partners as well as husbands and wives. Once you count all of that, the totals are huge for both sexes.
But within those figures sits a story that almost no one in public life seems willing to tell. Marriage is the lowest risk setting we have for both women and men. You see it most clearly when you look at how the Crime Survey breaks down domestic abuse by marital status. The Department for Work and Pensions recently drew this together in an equality analysis for its ‘Connect to Work’ programme. Using the 2024 Crime Survey, it reports that while 2.5 per cent of adults who were married or in a civil partnership had experienced domestic abuse in the last year, the percentage of those cohabiting was 5.1 percent, 7.6 per cent of those single, 11.8 per cent of the divorced and 15.0 per cent of the separated; 2.4 per cent of the widowed are affected and 4.8 per cent of adults overall. You can read that analysis here, see paragraph 85.
Put simply, if you are married, your risk of domestic abuse is around half that of someone who is living with a partner but not married. If you are separated, your risk is around six times as high as someone still married. The safest groups are the married or widowed. The most dangerous statuses are those where relationships have already broken down.
The ONS itself underlines that pattern. Its 2023 victim characteristics report notes that separated and divorced adults have much higher rates of domestic abuse than those who are married or cohabiting, and that men and women who are married or in a civil partnership are significantly less likely to be victims than those who are single, cohabiting, separated or divorced. That report is here.
The 2025 bulletin confirms that this is still the case, stating that a significantly lower proportion of adults who are married or in a civil partnership experienced domestic abuse than those who are cohabiting, single, separated or divorced.
The prevalence-and-trends release adds another telling detail. In the last year, 6.1 per cent of adults experienced abuse by a partner or ex-partner, but only 1.7 per cent were abused by a current partner, while 5 per cent were abused by an ex-partner. In other words, for those who are abused by a partner, it is almost three times as likely to be an ex as the person they are currently with. Those figures are in section 4 here.
None of this proves that marriage magically causes safety, or that separation causes abuse. ONS itself is careful to say that marital status may have changed as a result of abuse. But when the same pattern appears year after year, in different cuts of the data, it becomes hard to pretend it is an illusion. Whatever else is going on, stable marriage is where the risk is lowest. Cohabitation, serial partnership and relationship breakdown are where the risk climbs.
If you care about children, the picture is even starker. The 2025 victim characteristics bulletin reports that a startling 23.7 per cent of adults living in a single-person-with-children household experienced domestic abuse in the last year, compared with 8.1 per cent in households with more than one adult and children, and 7.2 per cent in households without children. Those figures are in section 11 here.
So when a child is in a single parent home, usually with the mother, that household is about three to five times as likely to experience domestic abuse as a two-parent home. And when, on top of that, an unrelated adult moves in, the danger can become lethal. A classic study in the journal Pediatrics found that young children living with an unrelated adult were nearly 50 times more likely to die from inflicted injuries than those living with both biological parents. In more than 80 per cent of those households the unrelated adult was the mother’s boyfriend, and in nearly three quarters of those cases the boyfriend was the killer. The paper is here, and there is a summary here.
That is what ‘family breakdown’ looks like at the sharp end. However understandable the individual stories, a culture that normalises serial cohabitation and a parade of ‘mum’s boyfriends’ through the home is not a culture that is keeping women and children safe.
Fathers matter here in two ways. The first is obvious. Marriage binds fathers into the same household as their children and their children’s mother. That alone, on the figures, reduces the risk of abuse compared with most alternatives. The second is deeper. What a boy believes about being a man, and what a girl believes she should accept from a man, is shaped above all by what they see between their parents.
Recent research from Australia’s ‘Ten to Men’ study makes the point in numbers. Ten to Men is a large longitudinal study of more than 16,000 males. Its new report on intimate partner violence finds that men who strongly agreed that they had received affection from a father or father figure in childhood were 48 per cent less likely to report ever having used intimate partner violence than those who strongly disagreed. That is summarised in this media release from the Australian Institute of Family Studies and in this government summary.
Good fathers, in other words, are not decorative. They are one of the most powerful long-term protections against violence we know about. A boy watches how his father speaks to and treats his mother. A girl watches the same thing. Both are learning what to do, and what to tolerate. And they are watching their mother too. When a mother honours and backs her husband in front of the children, and takes disagreements to him privately, she is teaching her sons to respect women and her daughters to respect themselves. When she routinely belittles, undermines or humiliates him, or uses contact and the courts to punish him, she teaches contempt and manipulation. That is a pattern of abuse as surely as raised fists are, even though it leaves no bruise.
Men are often deeply reluctant to report what is happening, not least because they fear being laughed at, not believed or even treated as the perpetrator. That blind spot is finally beginning to be acknowledged in Westminster. In April this year Conservative MP Ben Obese‑Jecty introduced his Interpersonal Abuse and Violence Against Men and Boys (Strategy) Bill, a Ten Minute Rule Bill calling for a dedicated strategy for male victims who are currently buried inside the ‘violence against women and girls’ narrative.
And only last week MPs held a Backbench Business debate in the Commons to mark International Men’s Day. That debate touched again on male victims of abuse and the difficulty men face in speaking about it at all.
None of this excuses violent or controlling husbands. Women in real danger need the police, safe accommodation and the courage and support to get out. Nor does it mean that mothers never act in good faith when they seek to limit contact with fathers who are genuinely dangerous. But if we are serious about tackling domestic abuse, we cannot ignore the pattern evident in the ONS tables. Marriage between a man and a woman is, on average, the safest place for women. It is also the safest place for men, and the safest place for children, especially when the father in that home loves and honours their mother.
The feminised state talks a great deal about ‘violence against women and girls’, but very little about marriage or fatherhood. The new ONS figures should push us in the opposite direction. The numbers point us, quietly but firmly, back towards a very old truth. If you want fewer women beaten, fewer men suffering in silence, and far fewer children growing up in violent or broken homes, you need more boys growing up to be good husbands and fathers, and more girls expecting and choosing them. And that means, as unfashionable as it sounds, putting marriage and committed fatherhood at the centre of our public conversation about domestic abuse.
