Crime trends in England and Wales and how we measure them (Latest release)

CSEW headline crime captures a range of personal and household victim-based crime in the interviewer-led parts of the survey including:

• theft
• robbery
• criminal damage
• fraud
• computer misuse
• violence with or without injury

In our quarterly release, Crime in England and Wales, we provide estimates for:

• the number of incidents of CSEW headline crime
• the number of CSEW headline crime victims
• the proportion of the population who experience a CSEW headline crime once or more (prevalence)
• the number of CSEW headline crimes experienced per household or individual (incidence)

Trends in the number of CSEW headline crime incidents to the year ending December 2023

Notes:

1. CSEW data for the year ending December 2022 and December 2023 are not designated as National Statistics.
2. CSEW data are not available for the year ending March 2021 because the Crime Survey for England and Wales was suspended because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
3. Estimates are statistically significant at the 5% level.

Download the data for trends in the number of CSEW headline crime incidents to the year ending December 2023 (XLSX, 35KB)

It is important to note that domestic violence reported in the interviewer-led parts of the CSEW is prone to significant under-reporting, because many victims will not be willing to disclose such incidents in the context of an in-home face-to-face personal interview. For this reason, our preferred measure of domestic violence comes from the survey's domestic abuse self-completion module, which are presented in our annual Domestic abuse in England and Wales bulletin.

Experiences of sexual assault, stalking and harassment are presented in our Sexual offences victim characteristics article, Stalking: findings article and Experiences of harassment in England and Wales bulletin. Standalone survey modules are used to gather information from respondents about these highly sensitive crimes in a different way to other crimes, and the data are captured and processed separately and are not directly comparable. For these crimes (and domestic abuse), we only present estimates related to the number of victims and the proportion of the population who were victims once or more (prevalence) because of difficulty with calculating the number of times a respondent has been victimised in these modules.

Trends in the prevalence of experiences of sexual assault and stalking, to year ending March 2023

Notes:

1. See notes from previous chart
2. The category "any sexual assault" include attempts.
3. Data for the year ending March 2023 are based on eight months of data collection because of an error in the survey, which resulted in missing data. Caution should be taken when using these data because of the impact of the reduced data collection period on the quality of the estimates.
4. Data for stalking are not available for the year ending March 2008 because comparable questions were not included in that year.

Download the data for trends in the prevalence of experiences of sexual assault and stalking, to year ending March 2023 (XLSX, 35KB)

The CSEW also measures a range of perception-related measures and other crime-related experiences, such as anti-social behaviour and attitudes towards the police.

See our Guide to finding crime statistics for further information on the statistics that we publish as well as how to find crime statistics for Scotland and Northern Ireland.

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