Laura Carter

Content warning for discussion of domestic abuse. The rest of this post is behind a cut.

There's a statistic that does the rounds every time the England men's football team is doing well. It surfaces the day of a big match, or maybe a little earlier.

It’s propagated by people who care about women’s rights and gender-based violence: women’s organisations, media outlets, individual feminists online. It gets picked up and passed along.

There’s different formulations. Here’s one I saw in advance of the Euros final on Sunday:

If England loses tonight, domestic abuse cases will go up by 38%.

Football is very popular in the UK, and even people who don't care about the sport know when the England men's team is in a big tournament. It’s impossible to avoid. So it’s a good opportunity for anyone who can link their issue to the match to gain a bit more attention.

This is good! More understanding of domestic abuse is a good thing. Highlighting the scale of the problem is good. But having worked in a domestic abuse support centre, I think this one misses the point a little bit.

It's easy to nitpick statistics used in public information campaigns. I do it a lot. But there's only so much you can convey in this kind of short communication, designed to be easily shared through social media ecosystems. To understand what's behind the stat, it's useful to dig into the actual research underpinning it.

Sometimes this is hard to do, but actually in this case it was quite easy to find the source of the 38% statistic. It's a research paper from 2014*, which looked at data from one police force** in England, the Lancashire Constabulary.***

Kirby, Francis and O'Flaherty looked at the incidents of domestic abuse reported on days when the England men's football team played in a World Cup match in the 2002, 2006 and 2010 tournaments, and compared police reports of domestic abuse on:

• Days when England played and won or drew their match
• Days when they played and lost
• Days following a match
• All other days

You can read the full statistical analysis in the paper, but their headline findings are interesting.

The researchers did find that reports of domestic abuse incidents increased by 38% when England played and lost. Percentages are dicey things to use in public awareness campaigns, but domestic abuse is horribly common,**** so a 38% increase is significant.

But they also found that when England played and the result was a win or a draw, domestic abuse also increased. By 26%.

And on the day after any match, incidents increased by 11%.

And this tracks with my experience as a very junior caseworker in a domestic abuse charity in south London, and explains why that social media statistic misses the point.

Framing the problem of domestic abuse as 'if England loses' carries an unspoken implication that it won't be a problem if they win.

But increased domestic violence isn't just linked to a losing England team.

It's linked to whether they play at all.

The UK's national domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247.

* If you don't have the Unpaywall extension, you can access the text of the article here. I recommend getting the extension.

** Of course, not all incidents of domestic abuse are reported to the police. The paper is clear about the limitations of this.

*** This police force covers an area of north-west England near Manchester including some major towns and cities (such as Blackburn and Preston) and the surrounding countryside.

**** In 2023, 5.7% of women and 3.2% of men experienced some form of domestic abuse. SafeLives has more facts and figures.