The Gap Nobody's Measuring: What the numbers really show about male victims of domestic abuse

I get asked a lot why I keep pushing for people to take male victims of domestic abuse seriously. Usually the pushback comes as a number: it's rare, they say, or it's exaggerated. So I want to walk through the actual figures, because the truth is more complicated, and more troubling, than either side of that argument usually admits.

Start with the survey data. The Crime Survey for England and Wales, run by the Office for National Statistics, estimates that around 1.5 million men and 2.2 million women experienced domestic abuse in the year to March 2025. Put those two figures together, and men make up roughly 40% of everyone who experienced domestic abuse that year. That's not a fringe number. That's four in every ten people.

Now look at what happens next. The Crown Prosecution Service's own charge data for a similar period shows that of 58,052 domestic abuse-flagged charges, only 9,393 named a male victim. That's about 16%.

Read those two numbers side by side. Forty percent of people who experience domestic abuse are men. Sixteen percent of the charges brought name one. That gap, between how many men experience this and how many charges follow, is the thing nobody's measuring, and the thing almost nobody's asking about.

I want to be careful here, because precision matters more than outrage. The ONS survey and the CPS charge data aren't measuring exactly the same thing. One asks people directly whether they've experienced abuse. The other counts charges that made it all the way to court. They cover slightly different time periods too. So this isn't one single, perfectly matched statistic. It's two separate, credible sources pointing in the same direction, and that direction is a real gap worth investigating, not proof of any one person's bad decision.

It's not just England and Wales. PSNI's new Every Victim Matters campaign found that 32% of domestic abuse victims recorded in Northern Ireland over the past year were male, and that cases with male victims were sanctioned at around 19%, below PSNI's own overall average for domestic abuse cases in recent years. Different force, different country, same pattern: men show up as a meaningful share of victims, and then something happens between the reporting and the outcome that isn't happening at the same rate for everyone else.

I don't think this is one villain, one bad decision, or one broken policy. I think it's a slow accumulation of assumptions: that victims are women, that men can handle themselves, that a man calling for help is somehow less credible or less urgent than a woman doing the same. None of those assumptions are written into law. All of them show up in outcomes.

This is exactly why training matters. When police, social workers, and frontline staff aren't taught to recognise what a male victim looks like, that recognition gap becomes a sanction gap. It's part of why I built Workshop Two around exactly this kind of pattern recognition for professionals.

But awareness starts with ordinary conversations, not just policy or professional training. If a man in your life ever tells you he's being abused, believe him the first time, not the third. That single shift, multiplied across enough people, closes more of this gap than any single charge decision ever could.

The numbers won't fix themselves. But naming the gap, and believing the men who fall into it, is the first step toward closing it.

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Further Reading

If this article resonated, these two books go deeper into the same territory:

• Why Didn't You Just Leave Them?: what it actually looks like to stay in, and eventually leave, an abusive relationship as a man.

• The Indifference of Good Men: exactly the kind of systemic gap this article is about, and why it persists.

All books, bundles, and signed copies are available at www.jaredwhitaker.com