Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment she has made with Cabinet colleagues of trends in the level of violence against women and girls in the UK; and if she will make a statement.

Violence Against Women and Girls crimes are often hidden and can go unreported to the police.

This means that police recorded crime data do not provide a reliable measure of trends in levels of Violence Against Women and Girls. Recently, levels of reporting have gone up. This may in part be due to improvements in police recording practices, but also simply because more victims and survivors are coming forward. We want to see these increase so that more victims and survivors can be supported, and so more perpetrators are brought to justice.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales provides a more reliable measure of prevalence and covers crimes that may not have been reported to the police. In the year to March 2022,

• 5.7% of adults aged 16 to 59 experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2022.
• 2.7% of adults aged 16 to 59 were victims of sexual assault
• 0.4% of adults aged 16 to 59 had experienced rape, including attempts.
• 4.7% of adults aged 16 to 59 had experienced stalking,

There were no significant change compared with the year ending March 2020, the last period for which data were published.

For domestic abuse, rape and stalking, longer-term trends have also remained relatively stable. Whereas, sexual offences have seen fluctuations with no clear trends.