Official Statistics

Statistics on so called ‘honour-based’ abuse offences, England and Wales, year ending March 2025

Published 6 November 2025

Applies to England and Wales

Frequency of release: Annual

Forthcoming releases: Home Office statistics release calendar

Home Office responsible statistician: John Flatley

Press enquires: pressoffice@homeoffice.gov.uk, telephone: 0300 123 3535

Public enquires: crimeandpolicestats@homeoffice.gov.uk

This release contains statistics about so called ‘honour-based’ abuse (HBA) related offences and incidents recorded by the police in England and Wales.

1. Introduction

This publication provides information on the number of police recorded offences which were identified as being so called ‘honour-based’ abuse (HBA)-related. This data has been collected by the Home Office from police forces in England and Wales on a mandatory basis since April 2019.

This data has been published to show the level of these offences dealt with by the police and to encourage other victims to report these offences to the police.

As with all police recorded crime figures, this data only covers offences that were reported to and recorded by the police. It is recognised that HBA is a hidden crime and victims can be reluctant to bring them to the attention of police or other authorities. This data, therefore, is likely to only represent a fraction of the actual HBA offences committed in the year ending March 2025. As such, Police recorded crime figures should not be seen as providing a reliable trend in these offences or of prevalence.

So called HBA-related offences and incidents, for the purposes of this collection, follow the police and Crown Prosecution Service definition of:

an incident or crime involving violence, threats of violence, intimidation, coercion or abuse (including psychological, physical, sexual, financial or emotional abuse) which has or may have been committed to protect or defend the honour of an individual, family and/or community for alleged or perceived breaches of the family and/or community’s code of behaviour.

Further information on HBA can be found on the Crown Prosecution Service website.

The collection includes, but is not limited to, crimes of forced marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM). Where a forced marriage or FGM offence is recorded by the police, it should always be tagged on their Record Management System, with an HBA identifier. The collection also identifies the number of FGM offences that have been reported to and recorded by the police following a referral via the FGM Mandatory Reporting Duty. This requires regulated health and social care professionals and teachers in England and Wales to report known cases of FGM in victims aged 17 and under to the police. The FGM duty came into force on 31 October 2015.

Any other notifiable offence can also be marked as being HBA-related by the police. The types of offences identified as being HBA-related are shown in the Key results section.

Also published are the number of HBA-related incidents that have not resulted in the recording of a notifiable crime. An example of an HBA-related incident could include where a neighbour or other third-party reports suspected HBA, but upon attending the incident (or after investigation), the police could not substantiate the report. In this circumstance, this would remain recorded as an HBA-related incident.

2. Key results

In the year ending March 2025, there were 2,949 HBA-related offences recorded by the police in England and Wales, a 7% increase compared with the year ending March 2024, when 2,755 offences were recorded. The rise in these offences was driven by a 35% increase in the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS, from 398 to 539 offences). This rise is likely to be due, in part at least, to improvements in the recording of such offences following the implementation of their new crime recording system in February 2024 (see Data quality section).

The level of these offences has fluctuated between 2,755 and 3,008 over the last 5 years (Figure 1). Trends in HBA-related offences recorded by the police will be affected by:

• changes in crime recording practices
• the police improving their identification of what constitutes so-called HBA, including training for officers to recognise the signs of HBA
• the likelihood of victims coming forward to report these offences to the police
• genuine changes in the level of these offences

Figure 1: Offences involving so called ‘honour-based’ abuse recorded by the police in England and Wales, year ending March 2021 to year ending March 2025

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

2.1 HBA offences by type

Of the 2,949 HBA offences recorded in the latest year, 109 were classified as FGM, 2 fewer than the previous year (111). These offences had been increasing, from 65 in the YE March 2021, the earliest year for which comparable data is available. Over half (58%; 63 offences) of the FGM offences recorded by the police came from the mandatory reporting duty for FGM.

The police recorded 125 forced marriage offences in the year ending March 2025, a fall of 76 compared with the previous year. This fall was due to a decline in the number of these offences recorded by the MPS (from 47 to 4 offences) and Greater Manchester Police (from 59 to 38 offences).

Table 1: Offences involving so called ‘honour-based’ abuse recorded by the police in England and Wales, year ending March 2025

	All HBA-related offences	FGM offences	Forced marriage offences	Other HBA-related tagged offences
England and Wales	2,949	109	125	2,715

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

In the year ending March 2025, 22% of HBA-related offences were for controlling and coercive behaviour, 13% for assault with injury and 9% for assault without injury. Other offences are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Proportion of offences (%) involving so called ‘honour-based’ abuse recorded by the police, by offence category, England and Wales, year ending March 2025

Source: Police recorded crime, Home Office

Notes:

1. Numbers may not sum to 100 due to rounding.

2.2 HBA incidents

In the year ending March 2025, there were 2,047 HBA-related incidents recorded by the police in England and Wales, an increase of 13% compared with the previous year (1,810). These cover incidents reported to the police that, following investigation, do not amount to an offence according to the National Crime Recording Standard.

Police recorded incident data is likely to be affected by changes in how incidents are recorded by police forces. In the last year, there was a steep increase in the number of HBA-related incidents recorded by the MPS, from 131 to 412. This increase was likely to be due to improved identification of such incidents following the implementation of their new crime recording system in February 2024 (see Data quality section). Conversely, HBA-related incidents in South Yorkshire Police fell, from 233 to 64, due to a change in their local processes in recording HBA incidents.

2.3 HBA by Police Force Area

Data at the Police Force Area (PFA) level needs to be interpreted with caution as the volume of these offences was relatively low in some PFAs and, as such, can be subject to a degree of fluctuation from year-to-year. Also, PFAs vary in their population size and demographic composition, therefore we would expect variation between them in any year.

For the year ending March 2025, the MPS recorded the highest number of HBA offences; 539 or 18% of the total recorded offences in England and Wales.

A breakdown of the number of HBA-related offences and incidents recorded within each PFA are provided in Statistics on so called ‘honour-based’ abuse offences, England and Wales, 2024 to 2025: data tables; table 5 and table 7, published alongside this release.

3. Data quality

While police forces have been asked to confirm the accuracy of the statistics in this release, the Home Office are aware of several potential data quality issues.

It is known that for some police forces, the identification of crimes as HBA-related relies on a police officer or other member of police staff remembering to correctly apply the HBA-related identifier to an offence on their Record Management System. Such identifiers are not always correctly applied. There may be some crimes that forces manage as being HBA-related but have not been identified as such in the data returned to the Home Office.

Forces either supplied record-level data via the Home Office Data Hub (HODH) or an aggregate data manual return. For forces who supplied data to the HODH, the Home Office extracts the number of offences for each force which have been identified by forces as being HBA-related. Therefore, counts of HBA via the HODH are dependent on the identifier being correctly applied for each respective offence.

In the manual return, police forces submit a quarterly spreadsheet containing a count of HBA-related offences and the number of FGM and forced marriage offences.

At the end of the financial year, the Home Office carried out a series of quality assurance checks on the HBA data collected from the police forces (either by the aggregate return or via the HODH).

These include checks:

• for any large or unusual numbers of HBA-related offences across forces
• large numerical changes by force between years
• that FGM and forced marriage offences were identified correctly
• that the type of offences identified as HBA-related seemed plausible

Police forces are then asked to investigate any issues and either provide an explanation or resubmit revised figures. Once these issues are addressed, the data is then tabulated and sent back to forces for them to verify. At this stage, they are asked to confirm in writing that the data they submitted are correct and if they are not, then they have the opportunity to revise their figures.

Home Office statisticians will continue to work with police forces to improve the data quality of this collection.

3.1 Change in MPS crime recording system

In February 2024, the MPS changed crime recording systems as part of a wider improvement project to replace several legacy IT systems with a single integrated solution.

The new system, CONNECT, is used nationally by several police services and allows more effective and efficient management of data related to intelligence, investigations, custody and other policing functions. As part of the change, the MPS have improved their process for adding markers to both incidents and offences. This change is likely to have led to the increase in the identification of these incidents and offences seen in the MPS over the last year. Due to the size of the MPS, these changes affect the national figures. As stated in the introduction, this data has been published to show the level of so-called HBA dealt with by the police but should not be seen as a providing a reliable trend in these offences.

It should be noted the possible under-identification of offences on the old IT system as being HBA-related would have had no downstream impact on the handling or processing of cases within the criminal justice system.