FOI reference: FOI-2026-3522
You asked
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I request the following information:
The number of women attacked and/or killed by a stranger by ethnic group in:
i) 2023/24
ii) 2024/25
iii) 2025/26
If possible, please include information on the victim's age, status of the investigation and gender of the offender.
This information should be made available to me in electronic form if possible.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Unfortunately, we do not hold all the information you have requested.
We do not generally hold detailed information on offenders for all offences recorded by the police and therefore are unable to provide a breakdown of women attacked and/or killed by a stranger by ethnic group, along with offender characteristics such as gender. Our published statistics relate to crime as experienced by victims (through the Crime Survey for England and Wales) or as recorded by the police.
Our data relate to England and Wales only.
Our publications and datasets that may be of interest include the following:
Nature of crime: violence - Office for National Statistics Table 7 provides a breakdown of the estimated number of violent incidents against men and women by whether the offender was a stranger. As noted above, this dataset does not include a breakdown by ethnic group of the offender. It does include some information on offender characteristics such as sex and age in Table 8h. As the Crime Survey for England and Wales is a victimisation survey, it does not provide data on homicide.
Homicide data is provided to us from the Home Office from the Homicide Index, we do not hold any further breakdowns of the data than is published. Appendix tables: homicide in England and Wales - Office for National Statistics feature a number of tables detailing incidents, victim and suspect characteristics, circumstances, and outcomes of homicide offences. For example, Tables 14 to 16 include information on the victim's sex and their relationship to the principal suspect, including a "stranger" category. These tables also include some breakdowns by ethnic appearance of the victim and principal suspect but it's important to note that they are officer-identified ethnicity classification for suspect and victim. As these data are collected and supplied to us by the Home Office, they may be in a better position to answer you more fully. They can be contacted via email at CrimeandPoliceStats@homeoffice.gov.uk
Information relating to offenders is primarily the responsibility of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). They publish Statistics each quarter which may be of help to you. You may find the following publications of interest:
Criminal Justice Statistics Quarterly: December 2025 - GOV.UK allows users to filter by various categories, including offence group, ethnicity and sex, to identify data on prosecutions, convictions and sentencing.
Statistics on Ethnicity and the Criminal Justice System, 2024 (HTML) - GOV.UK
If you have any questions, the Ministry of Justice may be able to assist further and can be contacted via: CJS_Statistics@justice.gov.uk
If you have any further queries about crime, whether relating to victims' experiences or police-recorded data, please contact us at CrimeStatistics@ons.gov.uk and we will do our best to assist you.