Domestic violence and ethnicity

You asked

Under the Freedom of Information Act I would like to request information in relation to domestic violence cases during the year 2016-2017, that involved Eastern European citizens living within England and Wales.

I am predominantly interested to find out statistics about victims that were originating from Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine.

We said

Thank you for your enquiry in which you asked for statistics about victims of domestic abuse originating from Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine.

To best answer your request from our available data, we have presented a table which provides the percentage of those interviewed as part of the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) who have been a victim of any domestic abuse and who were born in the Eastern European countries specified. Any domestic abuse includes non-physical abuse, threats, force, sexual assault or stalking carried out by a partner or family member. The year ending March 2017 CSEW found that 5.9% of all adults aged 16 to 59 were a victim of domestic abuse once or more in the last year and 2.5% of adults aged 16 to 59 who were born in any of the selected Eastern European countries were a victim of domestic abuse.

As there is a relatively low volume of domestic abuse victims interviewed who were born in the Eastern European countries specified, the sample size is not large enough to provide estimates of domestic abuse cases for the individual countries. Therefore, the analysis provided combines grouped data of all selected Eastern European countries in order to provide more robust results. We have also included estimated numbers of victims and confidence intervals around these estimates of domestic abuse from all adults and those from selected Eastern European countries of birth. Due to the large confidence intervals, the estimated number of domestic abuse victims from selected Eastern European countries of birth should be interpreted with caution.

We hope this information is useful for you. Should you wish to look at estimates for the same time period for all CSEW respondents, these are published in our annual supplementary tables (table S37) in our Crime in England and Wales year ending March 2017 publication and can be accessed here:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/crimeinenglandandwalesannualsupplementarytables

If you would like any further crime-related information in the future, you can email us at crimestatistics@ons.gov.uk and we will endeavour to help. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to ask.