WOMEN’S AID HAS recorded the highest level of disclosures of domestic abuse in its 50-year history, finding an 18% rise in 2023.

The organisation’s Annual Impact Report 2023 recorded 40,048 disclosures to its helpline and in face-to-face meetings during 28,638 contacts last year.

The report found that abuse of women included emotional abuse, physical violence, sexual abuse, and economic control, with many combining to constitute coercive control, with what Women’s Aid called “an alarming increase in both physical violence and economic abuse” compared to the previous year.

Physical violence against women rose by 74% while economic abuse went up by 87%. 

The women who contacted the domestic abuse charity reported that their partners or ex-partners were subjecting them to “a broad and brutal pattern of abuse”, Women’s Aid said. 

The reported abuses included assaults with weapons, constant surveillance and monitoring, humiliation, the taking and sharing of intimate images online, complete control of family finances, sexual assault, rape and being threatened with theirs or their children’s lives, the report found.

“The impacts on these women were chilling and ranged from exhaustion, isolation, and hopelessness to serious injury, suffering miscarriages, poverty, feeling a loss of identity and suicide ideation, hypervigilance, and homelessness,” the charity said.

• A cross-Europe investigation earlier this year found that over 100 women have been murdered in Ireland since 2012, and the country’s response is hindered by insufficient records. Read more here.

Women’s Aid CEO Sarah Benson said the findings were “utterly appalling” and reflected the experiences of other similar organisations.

“So many victims-survivors lack the information or confidence to contact specialist services, and about one third will suffer in total isolation, telling nobody what is happening to them,” she said.

“We still have so much work to do to break this silence to encourage those in need to get the support they deserve.”

Most of the women who contacted the charity’s national helpline reported being threatened with multiple forms of abuse, which can constitute coercive control. 

“Coercive control is a persistent pattern of controlling, coercive and threatening behaviour including all or some forms of domestic abuse (emotional, physical, economic, sexual including threats) with the most devastating outcome being the loss of life,” Benson said.