Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) is a big problem under a bright spotlight. But what do we really know about it? Late last year, FactCheckNI commissioned research into such violence, hoping to clarify discussions around this issue and provide some firm context. However, instead of clarity, we found confusion. Focusing only on VAWG and how it relates to the justice system, we ended up with more questions than answers.

[UPDATE 12/8/25 – FactCheckNI received a response from the PSNI to a FOI regarding the content of this article. You can read their response here.]

  • Does Northern Ireland’s justice system, and the PSNI in particular, collect appropriate data to really measure the extent of VAWG in Northern Ireland?
  • During our research, we found lots of statistical categories that are of relevance to VAWG but which could either include crimes that are not related to VAWG or miss out certain crimes that should be classed as VAWG – either way casting doubt on how valuable these statistics are when it comes to measuring what the Northern Ireland Executive says is one of its nine top priorities.
  • There is a chance that police data behind the scenes is much more robust and intelligible than what is publicly available. FactCheckNI made an extensive Freedom of Information request to the PSNI in May asking this, plus several other questions about the quality of VAWG data within the organisation. As yet, we have received no response.
  • Some good data on VAWG does exist, but all too frequently information that could and should be a matter of public record based on official figures instead relies upon the good work of people in civic society who are trying to piece together the overall picture from fractured sources.
  • This potential crisis in VAWG data is not limited to Northern Ireland. Our research shone a light on massive issues elsewhere in the UK, and across Europe. Society’s growing focus on VAWG is relatively recent, and data systems seem unprepared to allow for proper analysis of the issue.
  • All this exists amid wider problems for VAWG and data. Big social problems like domestic abuse and sexual violence are, to a significant degree, hidden. Many incidents go unreported to police. Attempting to properly identify the scale of these crimes relies heavily on estimation.
  • All of this is underpinned by one massive concern: the lack of an agreed definition for Violence Against Women and Girls. It’s not easy to address an issue when we can’t say what precisely that issue is.

For a deep dive into all of this, read on.

  • Data matters

How valuable is data? Used correctly, it can help illuminate trends and patterns in the world around us. Used poorly, it might say nothing at all. However, to be used at all it first has to exist – and be accessible.

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) has become a key political issue. The Executive’s current Programme for Government states that VAWG is one of the Stormont government’s nine “immediate priorities”.

This article will focus, for the most part, on VAWG-related crimes. How much do we know about misogynist violence and abuse in Northern Ireland? From a statistical point of view, there are apparent gaps.

Some of this is baked into the very nature of domestic abuse and other VAWG-related incidents. Some is a matter of what data is collected by the justice system. All of it makes tackling VAWG that bit tougher.

Numbers never tell you the whole story but they can help it be told better.  Without any facts and figures at all, we risk losing context for the stories we tell ourselves about the world around us.

This analysis isn’t a rant, or an exercise in blame. It should, however, provide plenty to think about for anyone interested in the issue of violence against women and girls, and in any policy response to the issue.

  • Recent research

Late last year, FactCheckNI decided to take a look at some of the claims regarding VAWG in Northern Ireland, to see if we could get a proper sense of the scale of the problem.

We commissioned a researcher with knowledge of the issue and asked them to give us a sense of the big picture, with a particular focus on levels of domestic abuse, sexual violence against women and VAWG-related murders.

The work was solid – but the picture it created was incomplete. It was hard to pin down a starting point, let alone track any progress (or not) over time. There are several reasons for this.

  • Inherent problems

Much of VAWG is hidden, especially when it comes to domestic abuse. Incidents are often behind closed doors and can remain unrevealed for years, or possibly forever.

Even when they are not hidden, they can be underrepresented. Women’ s Aid have said that there are “no reliable prevalence data on domestic abuse.”

In terms of other criminal offences, obtaining convictions for rape and other sexual offences is difficult. Figures from Rape Crisis England and Wales state that “71,227 rapes were recorded by police in 2024. And by the end of 2024, charges had been brought in just 2.7% of these cases.”

Several issues arise from this. The huge gap between the number of sexual offences recorded by police and the number of convictions presents two wildly-diverging statistics that ostensibly measure the same thing – but the general, and widely-known, lack of success in securing convictions means there may be many rapes and sexual offences that are never even recorded by police, let alone put to the court system.

Research published this year by the House of Lords Library found that “the percentage of victims in rape cases who no longer support police action is notably higher than for other types of crimes”.

Figure 1 – source: House of Lords Library

This reluctance by victims to engage fully with the justice system may indicate that rape is also often a hidden crime. Research from the US (focused on experiences within that country) by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center found that “rape is the most under-reported crime”.

With murders and other homicides, there are discrete complications. While a man abusing his partner or sexually assaulting a woman might clearly qualify as a VAWG-related crime, this is not necessarily the case when a man kills a woman. For instance, a robbery in a public place could lead to a killing where the ultimate motivations are about stealing money or goods.

Ultimately, there are unresolved questions about all aspects of VAWG, for one simple reason.

  • What is VAWG?

There is no commonly-agreed definition of VAWG. 

Last December, the Executive Office (TEO) published Ending Violence Against Women and Girls: Experiences and attitudes of adults in Northern Ireland in 2023. The report noted the UN’s definition (dating from 1993) that violence against women and girls means “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life”.

However, other definitions are available. SafeLives, a UK-wide charity aiming to reduce and ultimately eliminate domestic abuse, has published a lot of work on the impact of psychological abuse – which it sometimes refers to as “psychological violence”.

In its response to a 2020 UK Government call for evidence on tackling VAWG, SafeLives said that the government should uphold “established international and human rights-based definitions of VAWG” and deliver “a comprehensive and integrated approach to tackling all forms of VAWG – including domestic abuse”.

This makes sense, especially in NI, where legislative changes in 2022 introduced the crime of coercive control – covering a range of domestic abuse that doesn’t have to include any physical violence. Those changes have been welcomed as part of efforts to take on VAWG.

Announcing an advertising campaign to raise awareness of the new offence, Justice Minister Naomi Long made clear that neither physical nor non-physical domestic abuse should be tolerated.

If violence against women and girls is about more than just physical violence, any definition needs to reflect that. SafeLives’ call for definitions, plural, to be upheld by government is understandable, but it also gets to the heart of how unwieldy this issue is (or any issue can be) without properly-agreed and defined terms.

Beyond purely domestic problems, the lack of an agreed definition means comparisons in VAWG statistics between different countries are very difficult.

  • PSNI

In 2022, the PSNI published its first Tackling Violence against Women and Girls Action Plan, setting out how the force planned to address this issue locally.

Part of the plan involved ensuring proper governance and accountability, including a commitment to “develop a performance framework to monitor progress against the action plan”. The PSNI said this framework would ensure it has an understanding of:

  • Our current benchmark and outcomes within year one, year two and beyond
  • What measures will best allow us and others to monitor progress
  • What data is already collected elsewhere
  • What success looks like

A follow-up paper was published a year later, and includes a few mentions of data, including:

Figure 1 – source: PSNI

The year-one paper also includes mentions of progress in other data collection, including the apparent establishment of some baseline figures:

Figure 2 – source: PSNI

A second follow-up report was published a further year later and indicated there are still some issues with collecting data:

Figure 3 – source: PSNI

The action in figures 1 and 3 are the same action and ultimately data collection in these areas seems to be faced with barriers that are yet to be overcome. Given that “incidents that occur as a result of misogynistic attitudes” could, broadly speaking, be a catch-all description of VAWG crimes, this is a potentially serious issue when it comes to assessing VAWG levels.

Nonetheless, news releases from the PSNI (see this from July 2024 and this from September 2024) as well as this wider VAWG update all discuss “VAWG offences” and how levels of those have changed over time.

This may indicate indicate that the PSNI have some way of calculating total VAWG offences, although the footnotes from the news release from last September instead states that “VAWG offences include female victims of violence against the person and sexual offences (excluding offences of corporate manslaughter, death/serious injury by unlawful driving and assault on police)” – which does not explicitly include all VAWG crimes and, depending on how those statistics are analysed at a granular level (see below sections on wider PSNI statistics) may also include offences that are not VAWG related.

We asked the PSNI what exactly “VAWG crimes” are, whether they publish statistics specifically about these (we couldn’t find any dedicated VAWG-related information from them in the public domain) and, if not, we asked whether VAWG crimes could be identified in their broader publications about recorded crimes.

Because, as you’ll see, when we tried to sift through what data is available, this wasn’t always straightforward.

The police responded by saying that VAWG offences “include female victims of violence against the person and sexual offences (excluding offences of corporate manslaughter, death/serious injury by unlawful driving and assault on police)” – which repeats the words quoted a couple of paragraphs above – and referring us to their dedicated page on what the organisation is doing to address VAWG. They said further that:

“We do not have statistics recording all VAWG offences readily available within our scheduled statistical releases. There are occasions when a statistical breakdown is publicly available and, more generally, the number of female-only injured parties is routinely captured for all or a selection of offences.”

  • PSNI figures: domestic abuse

Despite this, the PSNI does publish a wide variety of figures that are of relevance to the issue of VAWG.

This includes both quarterly updates and annual reports on crimes related to domestic abuse, as well as its broader quarterly bulletins and annual reports on crime more generally.

The latest domestic abuse annual report, covering 2023-24, includes data for:

  • Domestic abuse crimes recorded by gender of victim
  • Domestic abuse homicides recorded by victim gender and relationship to offender

Both of these are relevant to VAWG but both also cover crimes outside the issue. Some relationships are same-sex relationships. If as a society we do want to specifically consider this as part of the discussion on VAWG, we should be clear on that: again, the absence of agreed definitions is a problem.

The same dataset includes figures for the gender of the offender in domestic abuse crimes, but this is for crimes in total and not broken down for each type of offence – and, importantly, it doesn’t include the gender of the victim so, as with the above, there is no easy way to pinpoint crimes with a female victim and male perpetrator.

It also includes a table on the “victim/offender relationship” for domestic abuse crimes – but this provides no context on the gender of either the victim or offender, and categories include “Current spouse, partner, girlfriend, boyfriend etc”, “Ex spouse, partner, girlfriend, boyfriend etc” and “Parent and child”.

So, while many of these data delineations are undoubtedly useful, in most cases the different categories either exclude certain categories of crimes that would be VAWG-related, include crimes that are not VAWG-related, or both.

The result is a broad absence of simply-presented data that can be pinpointed as something that measures (the entirety of) one strand of VAWG without including anything unrelated to the same issue.

  • PSNI figures: crimes overall

Similar problems emerge when looking at the PSNI’s overall crime figures.

The 2023-24 report on annual trends in police-recorded crime which, as with the above, includes some breakdowns of crimes by the gender of the victim – but, again, without cross-referencing this with the gender of the perpetrator.

The report’s accompanying dataset has dedicated tables covering:

  • Homicides by gender of victim
  • Online crimes, by the gender of the victim
  • Violence against the person and Sexual offences where the victim was under 18 at the time the offence was committed, by gender of victim

The dataset also includes “pivot tables” which allows anyone to examine different types of crime rather than specific offences. There is no category for murder but there is one for “Violence with injury (including homicide & death/serious injury by unlawful driving)”.

However, none of the above are cross-referenced with the gender of the perpetrator(s) or alleged perpetrator(s).

The PSNI also has a dedicated hub for Hate Motivation Statistics. This looks at incidents that are motivated by hate, but gender-based violence is not one of the analysed categories.

Instead, these are crimes and other incidents motivated by hate based on race, sexual orientation, sectarianism, wider faith/religion, disability and whether the victim is transgender.

On 22 May, FactCheckNI made a Freedom of Information request to the PSNI seeking to clarify exactly what data the force collects, and how it uses that data, in relation to VAWG. Once such an application is made to a public body, they are mandated to respond within 20 working days. This period ended by 20 June but as yet, the PSNI has not responded to our questions and has told us it is unable to provide a timeframe for responses.

The questions we sent can be found at the bottom of this article. We look forward to receiving the answers.

It is essential to note that the PSNI’s internal data could be substantially different and/or more detailed than the information that is in the public domain. However, this isn’t publicly-available, and without knowing the structure of what is captures, we don’t know what those differences are. The PSNI might already have substantive remedies to address all the concerns raised in this article but unless answers, reassurances and more-detailed data are made public, it’s impossible for the public (including factcheckers) to know.

  • Identifying issues

FactCheckNI are not the only people to have noticed possible issues with VAWG statistics in the justice system.

Last week, UUP MLA Doug Beattie put out a press release criticising the PSNI for recording information on gender rather than sex, when it comes to keeping records about victims and perpetrators of crime.

Mr Beattie raises a point worth considering, although his conclusions are different from our own. The UUP MLA states that the PSNI – which tends to record information on gender rather than sex – should record data on sex (which could be useful) but not record any on gender (our view is very much that they should keep recording this too).

While the 2021 Census in Northern Ireland included no questions about gender identity and instead only considered sexual orientation, 0.5% of respondents elsewhere in the UK stated their gender identity was different than their sex registered at birth.

All incidents of abuse or violence are of significance and we should aim for data that helps us understand how this can affect different social groups in different ways. The number of crimes involving people who are trans or non-binary is likely to comprise a fraction of total crime, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to record and analyse it properly.

Ultimately the best possible dataset will include this information too. Recording information in such a way that it captures both the gender and sex of people involved in crimes (again, both victims and perpetrators) is likely a good idea to provide a complete picture.

  • Data matters

It is hard to argue that any crime without both a female victim and a male perpetrator (or perpetrators) can be classed as a VAWG crime.

It’s also true that not every crime with a female victim and male perpetrator is VAWG related. Are scam texts VAWG? Is burglary? Injury as a result of dangerous driving? You wouldn’t assume so. This is why definitions matter.

While it might be the case that all rapes with a female victim and male perpetrator are examples of VAWG, the same isn’t true with murder. If a bomb goes off in a public space and kills indiscriminately, we would not assume that this has anything to do with negative attitudes towards women or girls. Discrimination is an essential part of what we mean by violence against women and girls.

The public presentation of Northern Ireland’s crime statistics places obstacles in every direction. Nothing is easy. Very few crimes can be clearly subcategorised into incidents that are examples of VAWG and those that are not.

More on that later. For now, let’s look at more statistics.

  • The work of Women’s Aid and others

Earlier this year, FactCheckNI contacted Women’s Aid Federation Northern Ireland to discuss what statistics they use to track VAWG and how they compile those statistics.

The organisation was able to send us data they had collected on all femicides in Northern Ireland since 2020 (they also track this information on an all-island basis), together with figures about their own service users – including stats on the number of women who have stayed in a Women’s Aid in the past five years and the number supported by them more generally in the same period.

We asked how they maintain their femicide records for NI and all of Ireland, and were told this is done manually. A staff member told us:

“I started this record when I first started working for Women’s Aid in 2020. Every time an adult woman has been killed within Northern Ireland, I await confirmation from police that her death is being treated as murder, and once confirmed, I had her name to the list. I then add all the details I can based on publicly available information, including the relationship with the alleged/convicted perpetrator, if they were killed at home, their age, etc, to try to build a picture. I then track the case through the courts until there is an outcome.

“I also cross check the femicide figures on my record every year against confirmed PSNI homicide figures for that financial year just to make sure I have not missed any women.

“Our sister organisation, Women’s Aid Ireland, maintain a record for the South. They too await confirmation from Garda Síochána that a murder has been committed and then add the women’s name to the list. They also try to gather information (if she was murdered at home, relationship to alleged/convicted perp,etc) based on publicly available information. I modelled the NI list off theirs, as their list goes all the way back to the Mid 1990s. We also maintain a joint All – Island list too, broken down by county.

“As far as I am aware, there is no central place all this information is collected in Northern Ireland. It’s why I created a Femicide Record for NI, to ensure these women’s names weren’t lost over time.”

This kind of work is similar to that found in the Femicide Census, which describes itself as “a unique source of information about women who have been killed by men in the UK and the men who have killed them.”

According to the Femicide Census:

“Men’s violence against women is a leading cause of the premature death for women globally but research in the UK and Europe is limited and unconnected.  The Femicide Census significantly improves upon currently available data by providing detailed comparable data about femicides in the UK since 2009, including demographic and social factors and the methods men selected to kill women.  By collating femicides, we can see that these killings are not isolated incidents, and many follow repeated patterns.”

Projects such as this do excellent work but, by their nature, they are compensating for gaps elsewhere.

Northern Ireland curates a wealth of statistics that – like UK-wide and Ireland figures – can be used to track the state of society and the economy and how they are changing over time.

Should we expect better and more detailed statutory information about VAWG? Especially when, as is now the case in NI, it is one of the central priorities of the government?

  • Knowledge

It’s difficult to talk meaningfully about any social problem without knowing its scale. Statistics aren’t everything but the less data you have, and the less reliable it is, the less you actually know.

But the challenge from imperfect data doesn’t stop there. About a decade ago, policymaking in NI changed its approach. Starting in 2016 – with a previous draft Programme for Government (PfG) – focus moved away from programmes, schemes and initiatives designed to tackle issues. Instead, all eyes were now on the effects of those programmes. Starting then, policy became about outcomes.

Data has a key role here. Outcomes are supposed to be measureable. This is done by identifying statistical indicators attached to headline outcomes, measuring those indicators over time and using those measurements as an evaluation of the success of various policy choices.

In theory, there could be many indicators for VAWG, each saying something a little different about the direction of society. These might include figures indicating:

  • the frequency of abuse in relationships
  • the scale of that abuse
  • the number of public incidents related to VAWG, including relevant crimes
  • offending rates for male sexual violence against females
  • the number of VAWG-related murders

The new PfG agreed by the Executive and published on 3 March, has nine “immediate priorities”, one of which is “Ending Violence Against Women and Girls”. What is the intended outcome? The 2024-2027 PfG says this:

“Our Target for 2027: By the end of this mandate, a minimum of 100,000 programme participants will have been engaged, there will have been three awareness raising campaigns, and our society will have significantly increased understanding and awareness of issues and will know how to take action to prevent violence against women and girls.”

The outcome is currently about awareness raising to increase the chance that people will intervene to prevent violence, rather than a flat reduction in the women and girls who experience violence.

  • Justice Minister

Late last year, FactCheckNI wrote to Justice Minister Naomi Long to ask her about something she said on BBC Radio Ulster’s Good Morning Ulster on 5 November last year, specifically that:

“Well, there is an indication [that] the levels of violence here in NI are higher; the levels of domestic abuse are higher; the levels of sexual abuse are higher.”

The Minister responded to us, saying:

“My response to the question about Northern Ireland having a ‘particular’ problem with violence against women and girls focused largely on the relationship between such violence and paramilitarism. Northern Ireland has a long and complex history characterised by a prevalence of paramilitary violence; and there is now a significant body of research which provides real evidence of, and insight into, the lived  experiences of women who have faced paramilitary-related gendered coercive control. This is what shaped the comments I made during the interview you refer to.”

The Minister highlighted various “interlinked” programmes that try to address this issue, including the Executive Programme on Paramilitarism and Organised Crime (EPPOC); the DOJ’s latest Domestic and Sexual Abuse Strategy 2024-2031; and the Executive’s new Strategic Framework to End Violence Against Women and Girls (EVAWG).

Other schemes mentioned include the Developing Women in the Community project which is led by the Department for Communities (and funded by EPPOC) and Ending the Harm (also part of EPPOC).

The Minister also pointed us to several pieces of research that look into VAWG from this perspective, including:

So, work is being done and there has been a lot of research undertaken into this area. But what is being measured? Are there official, publicly-available, regularly-updated statistics?

This article has already explored some of the difficulties with this kind of data. In the specific context of paramilitary influence, coercion and control, there are extra layers of challenge.

Whether looking at specific subsets to VAWG, or the issue more broadly, it is important to see that academic studies have taken place just as it is important that they continue to do so. However, relying too much on data that emerges from standalone research is not ideal.

Reliable, consistent, comparable public data – where possible – is vital.

  • This is not a local problem

If the data picture in Northern Ireland is lacking, we are not necessarily doing any worse than anywhere else.

In January, the National Audit Office published a report, Tackling violence against women and girls, that outlined some of the challenges for government commitments to tackling VAWG. Among its findings, the report noted:

  • The lack of a consistent definition for VAWG across public bodies and their approaches to measuring the scale of VAWG crimes has made it difficult to measure progress in a consistent way.
  • The Home Office is conducting a review to improve its ability to tackle VAWG, in parallel with developing a new strategy, due in spring 2025. The review aims to identify gaps in data, improve understanding of what works to tackle VAWG, and gather insights into cross-government capability.

The report’s conclusions state:

“The Home Office leads the government’s efforts to address VAWG, but to date these efforts have not improved outcomes for the victims of these crimes or the safety of women and girls more widely. The Home Office is not currently leading an effective cross-government response. It has a limited understanding of the extent of resources devoted to addressing VAWG across government and the impact this is having. Without this knowledge, the Home Office cannot be confident that the government is doing the best it can to keep women and girls safe…

“The Home Office’s review of the existing evidence base could provide a foundation from which to develop the next strategy. But it will need to maintain a focus on continuous evaluation to ensure it can capture learning from local innovation and adapt its approach.”

The first recommendation in the report is that the Home Office should “establish a shared vision for how the government’s target to halve violence and women and girls will be met, by … agreeing a common definition of VAWG across government and policing and identifying the data that will be used to measure this.”

In its response to the report, SafeLives welcomed the UK Government’s ambition to tackle VAWG, adding:

“However, as the NAO’s findings show, this will not be achieved without urgent improvements in leadership, funding, and data-driven decision-making …

“Lack of co-ordination across departments and services, as well as inconsistent local provision, means too many survivors are still being let down.

“Data gaps continue to undermine efforts to tackle domestic abuse. Without accurate, timely data, policymakers cannot assess the true scale of harm or whether interventions are making a real difference. The NAO’s findings reinforce this concern, and we urge the Government to act swiftly to improve the collection and use of data across all relevant sectors.”

The Office for National Statistics produced a VAWG dashboard some years ago but, according to this Freedom of Information response from November, development of the dashboard was “paused”, never officially launched, and the draft version that had been online was eventually taken down when its data became too out of date.

Outside the UK, the issues with data are just as significant. The Gender Equality Index is a data-driven project by the European Institute for Gender Equality that aims to score EU member states’ in terms of gender equality/experience in seven different areas: health, work, money, power, time, knowledge and violence.

The latest Gender Equality Index was for 2024, and was published in December – however it was incomplete. When first released, only six of the seven areas were given a score: violence was unrated.

The index has been subsequently updated, but because of “data limitations” the composite measure of violence could only be calculated for 12 of the 27 EU member states.

  • PSNI redux

This article focuses on crime as it relates to VAWG. In Northern Ireland, crime statistics are published by the PSNI.

Issues with their data, and how it relates to violence against women and girls, have been outlined above – but this critique should not be mistaken for major criticism of their efforts. 

Firstly, not all parts of VAWG relate to criminality. This article has mostly focused on criminality, and highlights some of the statistical gaps that exist therein but, while violence might broadly be criminal, the same isn’t necessarily true of abuse – or of any negative social attitudes that underpin, exacerbate and sometimes cause VAWG-related crimes.

The fact that data collection is so piecemeal in the rest of the UK and across Europe perhaps indicates that these are early days for developing and maintaining comprehensive and specific data for VAWG. The new laws on coercive control have created a new category of crime in Northern Ireland, which means more abuse is now of relevance to the police, but the fact this only happened in 2022 indicates that the crystallisation of VAWG as an issue within public discourse represents, if not exactly a new issue (misogyny didn’t start yesterday), then a new chapter in how we approach that issue.

More than all of this, however, is the question of what exactly the police – or the Department of Justice, or Stormont or large, of all of their equivalents at the UK-wide level – should actually be recording. Without an agreed definition of VAWG, this is very hard to pin down.

An agreed definition should be the starting point for a new, clear-sighted approach to data and VAWG – and allow the development and maintenance of a robust set of data that can be tracked over time, to help society see this issue in the most detailed and accurate way possible. Better quality data could also make more meaningful outcomes possible in future Programmes for Government: at the moment the outcome of raising awareness could be achieved, but the number of women and girls who experience violence could also rise.

  • FoI questions

FactCheckNI’s questions to the PSNI were as follows:

We note that there is no statutory definition of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG), nor is the commonly agreed or used definition across the UK. With that in mind, is there a definition of VAWG that is used by the PSNI? If so, what is it?

In response to a media enquiry from FCNI about what exactly comprises “VAWG offences”, the PSNI responded that, “Violence Against Women and Girls offences include female victims of violence against the person and sexual offences (excluding offences of corporate manslaughter, death/serious injury by unlawful driving and assault on police)” before referring us to the PSNI information page on its efforts against VAWG (see here).

Is it possible that your definition of “VAWG offences” excludes any offences that would be classified as VAWG offences under any reasonable definition of the term VAWG? Is it possible any such definition includes offences that would not be classified as VAWG offences by any reasonable definition of the term VAWG?

The rest of our questions concern the statistics the PSNI publishes on an annual basis about recorded crimes. We note that, in response to a media request from FCNI about the availability (or not) of dedicated statistics about VAWG crimes, the PSNI said: “We do not have statistics recording all VAWG offences readily available within our scheduled statistical releases. There are occasions when a statistical breakdown is publicly available and, more generally, the number of female-only injured parties is routinely captured for all or a selection of offences.”

Acknowledging, therefore, that a potential gap exists between the data known/used internally by the PSNI about VAWG offences and the data that is presented to the public, we would like to know the following:

  • Are all cases of domestic abuse with a female victim classified as VAWG offences? Could this therefore include cases where both the offender and victim are female? Does the PSNI consider those to be VAWG offences?
  • Are all cases of domestic homicide with a female victim classified as VAWG offences? Could this therefore include cases where both the offender and victim are female? Does the PSNI consider those to be VAWG offences?

The PSNI publishes figures for both domestic abuse and domestic homicide by the gender of the victim – however these are not cross-referred with the gender of the offender. The PSNI also publishes data about the gender of offenders in domestic abuse crimes overall – but there is no publicly-available way to cross-refer this data with the figures for domestic abuse/murder broken down by the gender of the victim.

Does the PSNI accept therefore that there is no way, using records that are publicly available, to precisely calculate how many cases of domestic abuse or domestic homicide have both a female victim and any male offender(s)/suspect(s)/perpetrator(s)?

Does the PSNI accept that similar issues occur when examining other types of crime – whereby some offences can be broken down by the gender of the victim, but there is no publicly-available way to cross-refer this with the gender of any offender(s)/suspect(s)/perpetrator(s)?

As and when we receive a response from the PSNI – which, as we’ve said above, could involve answers that address many of the concerns raised in this article – we will publish an update.

It’s worth once more acknowledging the point raised by Doug Beattie that data on sex registered at birth could also be useful in helping us understand more about VAWG. As above, we disagree that no heed should be paid to gender.

Our questions, above, all refer to gender – although that’s because we are querying the PSNI’s data and that is what they record. This article is about improving data collection and analysis to help us all understand society better. VAWG data should of course also include proper information about those who are trans or non-binary as well.