Domestic Abuse: Victims

(asked on 24th May 2021) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what comparative data his Department holds on the number of criminal cases involving domestic abuse in which there has been victim attrition in the year ending March (a) 2020 and (b) 2021.


Answered by
Kit Malthouse Portrait
Kit Malthouse
This question was answered on 2nd June 2021

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) does not hold data directly on “victim attrition”. No data is available centrally for the Magistrates Court. The closest data available relates to trials that are cracked due to witness absence/withdrawal at the Crown Court. A cracked trial refers to a trial that does not go ahead on the planned day as an outcome is reached in advance and so does not need to be re-scheduled. This occurs when either an acceptable plea is offered by the defendant, or the prosecution offers no evidence against the defendant.

Our data relates to ‘Violence against the person’ as opposed to ‘domestic abuse’, as a domestic abuse flag is not available within our datasets. Just over one-third (35%) of the 1,680,884 ‘violence against the person’ offences recorded by the police in England and Wales in the year ending March 2020 were domestic abuse-related (ONS, year ending March 2020).

As the next publication of this data is not until June, the PQ cannot be answered comparatively at this point. The MoJ can however provide alternative comparative data on the number of criminal cases involving ‘violence against the person’. The latest data relating to January-December 2019 and January-December 2020 was published in December 2020 and shows:

  • Between January-December 2019, 224 ‘violence against the person’ trials were cracked due to witness absence/withdrawal at the Crown Court (Ministry of Justice trial effectiveness data).
  • Between January-December 2020, there were 94 cracked trials for this reason; a 58% decrease. This coincides with a 24% decrease in the total number of trials in the same period (from 11,510 in Jan-Dec 2019 to 8,784 in Jan-Dec 2020).
  • The proportion of ‘violence against the person’ trials becoming cracked due to witness absence/withdrawal increased by one percentage point between Jan-Dec 2019 and Jan-Dec 2020 (from 8% to 9% of cracked trials).
  • N.B. cracked trials data relates to trials which become cracked only on the day of trial and does not include trials which fall through before this day.
Reticulating Splines