Cases of violence against women and girls need broader questioning so that investigators do not overlook other “often hidden” crimes, prosecutors warned.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said there was a “significant overlap” between some offences, with data showing an “increasing relationship” between domestic abuse and crimes such as rape, strangulation, so-called revenge porn and stalking.
But “there has not been enough appreciation that abuse often involves different levels of criminality,” said Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Parkinson.
Parkinson said her personal priority was to improve prosecutions for violence against women and girls (VAWG), as the CPS launched a five-year strategy to tackle such crimes in England and Wales.
The term violence against women and girls includes crimes such as harassment, stalking, rape, sexual assault and murder.
While men and boys also suffer many of these forms of abuse, they disproportionately affect women, says the National Police Chiefs’ Council.
“It is vital that we train our staff to recognize the full picture of abuse, so that the charges we bring reflect the totality of the crime,” he added.
Over the past five years, on average more than a third of rape charges were related to domestic abuse, the CPS said.
According to CPS data, more than nine in 10 charges of honor abuse and strangulation or suffocation were related to domestic abuse.
So were more than eight in 10 charges of stalking and revenge porn, and more than six in 10 charges of stalking, he said.
As part of its strategy, the CPS will develop and implement new VAWG training modules on honor abuse, forced marriage, female genital mutilation and stalking.
And it said it will review and update the prosecution’s guidance on domestic abuse to incorporate learning and understanding.
Baljit Ubhey, director of policy and senior officer responsible for the CPS’s VAWG strategy, said the prosecutions were a “deterrent”.
He said investigators should not be “blind” or pigeonhole crimes by ignoring the overlap between some crimes.
“The evidence shows that these crimes are a complex web of harms that are often hidden, repeated and all too often overlooked,” he said.
He continued: “What this means in practice is that when a victim reports a crime there may be a much deeper pattern of offending across a range of crime types and it is vital that this is explored as part of a process.”
The government has committed to halving violence against women and girls within a decade.
In July, the ONS estimated that around one in eight women were victims of sexual assault, domestic abuse or stalking in the last year. It was the first time the ONS had given an estimate of the combined prevalence of the three offences, after being asked by the Home Office to help check the government’s ambition.
A report earlier this year found that the Home Office’s response to the “serious and growing problem” of violence against women and girls had been ineffective.
The National Audit Office report in January said the department had “failed to lead an effective system-wide response” to the rising incidence of police-recorded rapes and sexual assaults.
A Home Office spokesperson said at the time that the report had looked at the previous government’s “failure to deliver systemic change” and that Labor was “taking a step forward in the government’s response”.
