There is a classic Christmas episode of EastEnders in which much-loved character Little Mo is abused by her husband, Trevor. After visiting her sisters on Christmas morning, Mo is late for dinner. When she returns, Trevor grabs his wife by the hair and pushes her face into her waiting plate. Gravy dripping down her skin, Mo is pushed out of her chair and forced to eat turkey off the floor.
It was a harrowing storyline but made more so because the viewer knew this was not just fiction: there are countless real-life Little Mos out there, trapped at home in fear and pain at a time of year that should bring joy and peace.
More than 20 years after the episode aired, it feels as if Britain has made little progress. Every January, headlines report a rise in domestic abuse over Christmas, right next to the phone detox guides and weight-loss tips. Women’s Aid says it typically sees a 15% increase in cases immediately after the festive period, although this is thought to be a significant underestimate.
Domestic violence charities frequently report more calls to their helplines in the new year, with Leeds Women’s Aid noting recently that it expects a 50% rise in contacts in January compared with December. Meanwhile, the Crown Prosecution Service and police forces issued warnings last month for abusers “to expect a knock on the door this Christmas” in anticipation of soaring incidents over the holidays.
The reasons for this increase are well established: financial pressures, more time spent alone with family and higher alcohol consumption typically raise the risk of violence and coercion, while the fact that many services – from GPs to workplaces and schools – are closed or run reduced hours means victims are often more isolated than usual and can struggle to get help.
And yet the irony is the rise in violence that is expected over the festive period can actually downplay the wider crisis. As Refuge told me last week: “Christmas is often linked to domestic abuse … In reality, domestic abuse is happening all year round but is severely underreported in the media at other times of the year.”
The scale of this is worth stressing. Almost 2 million adults in England and Wales are estimated to be victims of domestic abuse every year, with violent crimes against women increasing in the past decade. In 2024 alone, the Guardian counted 80 women whose death has led to a man being charged. The bleakness of this is not simply that scores of women had their lives taken last year but that 2025 will be no different. According to the Femicide Census, there has been no tangible decline in femicide since it first started recording data in 2009: a woman has been killed by a man, on average, once every three days over a 10-year period. Another three women are said to die by suicide every week after enduring abuse. Whether the sun shines or the snow falls, male violence is a constant: a kind of low-level background hum to our society that if there were any justice would be a siren.
Besides, the idea that alcohol or money problems cause abuse shifts responsibility away from the perpetrators, while playing down the complex structural factors that lead to misogyny and gendered violence. Just as the fact domestic abuse often spikes during the Euros or World Cup shouldn’t lead to a debate about football, that women are beaten and raped at Christmas does not mean the conversation we need to have is about the stress of the holidays. A new year’s hangover doesn’t cause abuse – violent men and a culture that excuses and normalises them does.
Changing this will be – in the words of the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips – a “herculean” task, but it’s one that is at least being attempted. In the coming weeks, the government will release more details of its strategy to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade – a pledge the party first made in its manifesto last summer.
Making a dent in violence against women – let alone achieving such an ambitious aim as halving it – will take the kind of coordinated effort Whitehall is not exactly famed for: from tackling the attitudes that lead to male violence, right back to teaching young men in school; giving survivors access to safe housing, mental health services and social security, including funding the refuges that have had their budgets cut over the past decade; to addressing the court backlogs that are leading rape victims to pull out of long-delayed trials.
That women’s groups and shelters are warning the rise in employers’ national insurance will put the government’s VAWG mission “in jeopardy”, on top of concerns that domestic abusers have been let out of prison early due to overcrowding, shows starkly how – in the competing interests of governance – good intentions alone are not enough.
It would be easy to read all that and dismiss the idea domestic abuse can ever be solved. There are some rots that burrow so deeply into the fabric of society that they begin to feel inevitable, not least in an era of social and economic crisis. Britain in 2025 is hardly a country ripe with the conditions for hope. The current political climate is defined by a kind of melancholic cynicism, in which a population that has lived through decades of neglect and decline feels resigned to the limits of government, and a general mistrust of the political class. When getting a dentist appointment seems like a pipe dream, politicians’ promises of large-scale societal change can easily sound far-fetched or worse, like empty words.
Is it realistic to say the epidemic of domestic abuse can be tackled in 10 years? I don’t know. But perhaps it is enough to try. There is some suffering that is so profound, so accepted, it is a radical act to believe we could ever be free of it. The idea that it is just “one of those things” that women are routinely beaten and bullied in our own homes is a good way of ensuring the horror keeps happening. Imagine waking up on New Year’s Day 2035 and seeing a headline that says half as many women were abused over the holidays than a decade ago. As the dark days drag on into another year, that is a speck of hope worth grasping for.
