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1.8 mln adults suffer domestic abuse in England, Wales

Xinhua, December 8, 2016 Adjust font size:

An estimated 1.8 million adults in England and Wales, aged 16 to 59, said they were a victim of domestic abuse in the last year, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said in a report Thursday.

A large number of domestic abuse-related incidents were recorded by the police (1.03 million) in the year ending March 2016, according to the report.

Following investigations, the police concluded that there were 421,000 domestic abuse-related crimes, amounting to around 4 in every 10 or 41 percent of the incidents reported to the police.

ONS said the figures have emerged from a study of data from a range of crime and incident statistics, with almost 8 in every 100 women reporting being victims of domestic abuse.

ONS said domestic abuse is not limited to physical violence and can include repeated patterns of abusive behavior in order to maintain power and control in a relationship. A third of the reports cited violence, with sexual abuse reported in 12 percent of complaints.

The figures for the year show that six in every 100 adults aged 16 to 59 have experiences domestic abuse.

Of the total, an estimated 1.2 million women were victims domestic abuse in the past year, along with 651,000 male victims.

The highest number of female victims were aged 16 to 29, while for males the highest proportion of complaints came from 16 to 19 year olds, according to the statistics.

ONS said a decision to charge abusers was made for 70 percent of domestic abuse-related cases referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) by the police, with three quarters of the abusers convicted of crimes.

The study shows that over half of the prosecutions (53 percent) were unsuccessful. In some cases the abused victims retracted their complaints, and in other cases the abused person did not show up in court to give evidence.

ONS said police in England and Wales investigated 432 domestic homicides over the past three years, almost a third of killings involving victims aged 16 and over. Endit