A Rapid Impact Survey to Monitor the Nature and Prevalence of Economic Abuse in the UK: Aggregate Data, 2024

Wilson-Garwood, Rosa (2026). A Rapid Impact Survey to Monitor the Nature and Prevalence of Economic Abuse in the UK: Aggregate Data, 2024. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-858441

(This dataset was funded through the wider project MR/V049879/1 via their 'VISION Small Projects Fund').

Description of wider project:
Violence causes harms to health. The harms to mental health can be more long-lasting than the immediate harms to physical health and have consequences that reverberate through a person's life impacting on their functioning in society. Reducing such 'upstream' determinants of poor mental health would significantly improve the health of the population. This would reduce health inequalities since being a victim of violence is more prevalent among those who are already disadvantaged.
The Consortium would investigate the effectiveness of interventions to reduce violence and, thus, reduce health inequalities. Within the field of violence, we have special interest in domestic and sexual violence because these are significant causes of inequalities in mental health, which have been relatively neglected in the scientific and statistical evidence base. We address how to mainstream these issues across multiple sectors rather than seeing them as only of specialised concern.
Multiple institutions are relevant to preventing violence. They include not only health services, but also criminal law enforcement (most violence is a crime), civil law (e.g. domestic protection orders), specialised services (Third Sector organisations that help victim/survivors of violence), and governmental bodies concerned with law, policy and data quality. The connections between violence and ill health are complicated since they are mediated by many of these institutions. Identifying these connections would aid the development of more effective interventions while a complex systems analysis captures the adaptive behaviour between these systems.
The data needed to assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions is currently weak. This is partly because each specialised academic discipline and profession has a different way of measuring violence, which makes cooperation across these differences difficult. Not only do we need harmonised core metrics for the evaluation of interventions and cross-sector cost-benefit comparisons, we also need to adapt and extend our metrics to capture newly identified forms of abuse such as that facilitated by technology. The Consortium aims to improve the measurement framework and data availability to aid the evaluation of interventions. This is premised on cooperation between academics and practitioners. The project seeks to identify profiles of persons and incidents exposed to violence and link data from multiple services and surveys. We would assist services to make their own data more useable and more available. This involves care and attention to issues of data protection and the development of bespoke agreements on data sharing that respect communities that generate data.
We would unlock the potential in multiple data sources rather than collect new data. These datasets include major national surveys such as the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, and the Crime Survey for England and Wales, and also administrative data sets from professions and practitioners, including the police, solicitors, health and specialised services. These datasets will be linked in a new integrated dataset and provide an evidence base upon which a cost-benefit framework and risk assessment tools can be developed.
With the linked data and new tools, we would assess key interventions. These are interventions at the level of institutions and systems. Our focus is the prevention of violence in the population rather than the treatment of trauma in individuals. The Consortium seeks to mainstream evidence of the significance of violence for health in policy making. We would engage with decision-makers concerned with the commissioning of services and policy makers concerned with priorities for public expenditure, as well as wider publics.
The aim is to reduce the harm to health, especially mental health, by identifying the most effective and cost-effective interventions to reduce violence in the population.

Data description (abstract)

This research was made possible through the generous support of the VISION consortium, which is funded by the UK Prevention Research Partnership (MR/V049879/1), an initiative funded by UK Research and Innovation Councils, the Department of Health and Social Care (England) and the UK devolved administrations, and leading health research charities.

This dataset was generated as part of Counting the Cost: The Scale and Impact of Economic Abuse in the UK, a landmark study conducted by Surviving Economic Abuse (SEA). The motivation for the study was to address the urgent need for robust evidence on the prevalence, forms, and impacts of economic abuse, a hidden but widespread form of domestic abuse recently recognised in UK law. Economic abuse undermines victim-survivors’ ability to acquire, use, and maintain financial resources, leaving many trapped in unsafe relationships and long-term instability.

The study aimed to quantify the scale of economic abuse among women in the UK, explore the tactics used by perpetrators, and assess the impacts on victim-survivors’ financial security, health, and safety. It also sought to highlight disparities in experiences across different demographic groups, including younger women, disabled women, Black, Asian and other ethnically minoritised women, migrant women, and women with children. By doing so, the research intended to inform public understanding, policy development, and service provision.

Data were collected through a nationally representative online survey of 2,849 adult women in the UK, conducted between 25 October and 1 November 2024. The survey explored experiences of economic abuse by a partner or ex-partner in the preceding 12 months, including behaviours of restriction (e.g. blocking access to bank accounts), exploitation (e.g. coerced debt, theft of money), and sabotage (e.g. damaging property, interfering with employment). Booster samples were included to ensure sufficient representation of women from Black, Asian, and other ethnically minoritised backgrounds. The dataset is weighted to reflect the offline population proportions of women aged 18+ by age, region, social grade, education, working status, and ethnicity.

Key findings include:

1. One in seven UK women (4.1 million) experienced economic abuse in the past year.

2. Marginalised groups were disproportionately affected: nearly one in four disabled women, two in five women aged 18–24, and one in four women in London reported abuse.

3. Black, Asian and other ethnically minoritised women were more than twice as likely as White women to experience economic abuse.

4. The impacts were severe: 72% of victim-survivors reported harm, with many left in debt, homeless, or unable to flee.

5. Awareness of economic abuse increased help-seeking, with nearly six in ten women who recognised the term reaching out for support compared to four in ten who did not.

This dataset provides a unique and nationally representative evidence base on economic abuse in the UK. It captures both the prevalence and diversity of abusive behaviours, as well as their disproportionate impact on marginalised groups. It is intended to support further research, policy development, and interventions aimed at ending economic abuse and ensuring victim-survivors can achieve safety and economic independence

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