Violent Crime: year ending December 2017

Violent crime in England and Wales, including minor assaults, harassment and psychological abuse, wounding, physical assault and death

Release date: 26 April 2018
Next release: 19 July 2018 (provisional)

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Crime Survey shows long-term drop in violent crime but little change in recent years

Around 2 in every 100 adults were a victim of violent crime in the latest survey year, compared with around 3 in 100 adults in the year ending March 2007 and 5 in 100 adults in 1995 (the peak year).

However, in the year ending March 2017, the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) showed that more than half of violent crime victims (57%) did not report their experiences to the police.

This is a return to levels seen preceding the year ending March 2013, following higher levels of reporting in the previous three years.

Long-term reductions in violent crime supported by other data

The longer-term reductions in violent crime shown by the CSEW are backed-up by recent admissions data for NHS hospitals in England.

Assault admissions for the year ending March 20172 (26,450) are 42% lower than the year ending March 2007 (45,890).

Research conducted by the Violence and Society Research Group at Cardiff University (PDF, 502KB) shows similar findings.

Their annual survey of a sample of hospital emergency departments and walk-in centres in England and Wales, show that serious violence-related attendances in 2017 have fallen 39% since 2010.

Similar to the latest CSEW findings, the latest data show little change in 2017 compared with 2016 (1% increase).

Police recorded further rises in less common types of violence

Police reported a larger number of homicide, firearm crimes and knife crimes in the year to December 2017.

While the Crime Survey for England and Wales gives us a good picture of the overall trends in violent crime, it is not good at measuring some types of violence. Police recorded crime is a better measure of the higher-harm but less common types of violence.

Violent crime data

This page mainly reports on data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and police recorded crime.

View all data

More information on both these sources can be found in the User guide to crime statistics for England and Wales.

Other data used on this page

Using violent crime data

More pages in this collection

More about violent crime

Contact us

Mark Bangs
crimestatistics@ons.gov.uk
+44 (0)2075 928689

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