Women’s Aid: Domestic Abuse Disclosures at a Record High in 2023
- Women’s Aid’s Annual Impact Report 2023 details 40,048 disclosures of domestic abuse against women and children, during 28,638 contacts with its national and regional support services last year.
- 18% increase in disclosures of domestic abuse compared to previous year and the highest ever received by the organisation in its 50-year history.
- Abuse of women included emotional abuse, physical violence, sexual abuse, and economic control, many combining to constitute coercive control, with an alarming increase in both physical violence (up 74%) and economic abuse (up 87%) compared to the previous year.
- Also released is a new Insights Report into 11 publicly reported cases of coercive control convictions through the courts reveals the devastating scale and harm of this offence and raises questions about maximum sentencing for this offence.
- Implementation of the Third National Domestic, Sexual and Gender-Based Strategy, with cross government co-operation, is crucial to effectively reduce the scale of violence against women.
Women’s Aid, a national organisation supporting victims-survivors of domestic abuse, reveals that they have recorded the highest level of disclosures of domestic abuse in its 50-years history. The Women’s Aid Annual Impact Report 2023 outlines 40,048 disclosures with its National Freephone Helpline and Regional Face-to-Face services during 28,638 contacts last year. This represents an 18% increase on the previous year and the highest ever recorded by the organisation. Last year, women told Women’s Aid that their partners or ex-partners were subjecting them to a broad and brutal pattern of abuse. Women reported assaults with weapons, constant surveillance, and monitoring, relentless put downs and humiliations, the taking and sharing of intimate images online, complete control over all family finances, sexual assault, rape and being threatened with theirs or their children’s lives. The impacts on these women were chilling and ranged from exhaustion, isolation, and hopelessness to serious injury, suffering miscarriages, poverty, feeling a loss of identity and suicide ideation, hypervigilance, and homelessness.