Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the prevalence of the underreporting of (1) domestic abuse, (2) sexual violence, and (3) hate crimes.

The best measure of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG), including domestic abuse and sexual violence, is prevalence as reported through the CSEW because this is anonymous, includes crimes not reported to the police and is unaffected by changes in levels of reporting to the police or police recording practices.

The gap between police reports of domestic abuse and sexual violence and the number of victims and survivors estimated by the CSEW means there is a significant number of unidentified cases.

As part of our unprecedented mission to tackle the national emergency of VAWG we have worked with the ONS to develop a new combined metric to better capture the scale of these crimes for the first time.

For our forthcoming Strategy for tackling Violence Against Women and Girls we will use a broad suite of metrics to provide a more comprehensive understanding of VAWG across Government and society.