This week the UK government announced that men who murder their partner or ex-partner in their own home could face an extra ten years in prison. Under the old rules, if a man brought a weapon to the scene with intent to kill, he faced a 25-year starting point. But if he killed her at home — most often with a knife that was already in the kitchen — the starting point was only 15 years. Same crime. Same devastation. A decade’s difference in how the law valued her life, simply because of where the knife came from.
That gap is finally closing. Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy said the change will “ensure those who murder their partner face sentences that better reflect the devastating harm they cause.” I want to be clear about this: it’s good news. It’s overdue. It’s a win for the mothers — Carole Gould, Julie Devey, Elaine Newborough — who turned the unbearable grief of losing their daughters, Poppy, Ellie and Megan, into a campaign that changed the law. More than a fifth of all murders in England and Wales happen within families or relationships, and women are overwhelmingly the ones who don’t survive them. For some men, a longer sentence might genuinely be a deterrent, and for the families left behind, it might finally feel like the justice system is putting a woman’s life on the same scale as a man’s.
But I keep coming back to the same question. If the sentence is ten years longer, that’s still a woman who is dead. That’s still a family standing at a graveside instead of a wedding, still children growing up without a mother. Longer prison sentences are justice after the fact. They are not prevention. And prevention is the piece nobody wants to properly fund.
The scale of what we’re actually dealing with
Let’s sit with the numbers for a second, because I don’t think most people have any real sense of how big this crisis is.
In the UK, a woman is killed by a man on average every three days. Narrow that down to women killed specifically by a current or former partner, and it’s roughly one every four days. In the year ending March 2025, there were 111 domestic homicides recorded in England and Wales — 75 of the victims were women, and 67 of all victims were killed by a partner or ex-partner. Domestic abuse now costs the UK an estimated £78 billion a year. Not in prevention. In damage.
Refuge’s National Domestic Abuse Helpline received 174,562 calls and contacts in the year to March 2025 — that’s roughly 478 women reaching out every single day, just to one helpline, just in England and Wales.
And it isn’t only a UK problem. In Ireland, Women’s Aid recorded 37,790 contacts through its national helpline and frontline services in 2025 — over 100 women a day — and 62,275 individual disclosures of abuse against women and children, a 33% jump on the year before. One in three women in Ireland will experience physical, psychological or sexual abuse from an intimate partner in her lifetime.
Then there’s the part of this crisis we talk about even less, the women who don’t die at the hands of their abuser, but die because of him. It’s estimated that almost 30 women a week attempt suicide in the UK as a result of domestic abuse, and around three women a week die by it. Suicide linked to domestic abuse has now overtaken direct domestic homicide as a cause of death. Read that again. More women are being driven to take their own lives because of what was done to them than are being killed outright. That is not a footnote. That is the crisis hiding inside the crisis.
These are not accidents. These are not unavoidable tragedies. Every single one of these deaths was preventable.
So where is the money going?
We pour millions upon millions every year into prisons — into holding men after they have already killed, already maimed, already broken a family beyond repair. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be held accountable, they absolutely should. But we are pouring that same energy and that same money into the back end of this problem, when the front end — the part where we could actually stop it happening — gets a fraction of the investment and a fraction of the attention.
Where is the funding to go upstream? Where is the funding to catch this before a boy becomes a man who thinks control and violence are how you keep a partner? Because that man wasn’t born that way. Somewhere along the line, something taught him that. Or nothing stopped him learning it. What was he exposed to? What did he see modelled at home, online, among his mates? What measures do we have in place, right now, to make sure the next boy doesn’t grow into the next man on that list?
Education is the only way we actually bring these numbers down. Not just awareness campaigns aimed at women teaching them how to spot red flags and how to leave safely — although that work matters and it saves lives. I mean education aimed at boys, starting as early as primary school, teaching emotional regulation, teaching that violence is never the answer, teaching what healthy relationships and respect actually look like, long before those attitudes have hardened into adulthood.
We have to stop making this women’s work to fix
We have some brilliant organisations doing prevention work in this space. But be honest with yourself for a second — who is most of that work aimed at? Women. Teaching women how to recognise abuse. Teaching women how to leave. Teaching women how to protect their kids. We have made it women’s job to solve a problem that men are overwhelmingly responsible for creating.
That has to flip. We need fathers, brothers, coaches, teachers, uncles — men — showing up for boys’ education around violence, consent, respect and control. Not because women’s voices don’t belong in that conversation, they absolutely do, but because boys need to see men who aren’t abusive modelling something different, actively, and telling them it matters. This can’t keep being framed as a “women’s issue” that women are left to manage on their own. It’s a societal issue, and it needs men standing shoulder to shoulder with women as allies to fix it, not standing on the sidelines while women do the emotional and practical labour of keeping themselves and their children safe.
Both things can be true
This new sentencing law is a genuine win, and I’ll celebrate it. Poppy, Ellie and Megan’s mothers deserve to see that campaign land. But a longer sentence is something we do after a woman is already dead. I want to see that same energy, that same political will, that same funding, going into the years before that — into primary schools, into youth work, into programmes for boys and young men, into breaking the cycle before it starts rather than punishing it once it’s finished.
Because until our governments are willing to invest as heavily in prevention as they do in incarceration, we will keep having this same conversation. We’ll keep reading out the same lists of names. And somewhere, right now, there’s a little boy who could grow up to be a good man instead of the next name on that list — if only someone had reached him first.
If you or someone you know is affected by domestic abuse:
UK — National Domestic Abuse Helpline (Refuge): 0808 2000 247, 24/7
Ireland — Women’s Aid National Freephone Helpline: 1800 341 900, 24/7
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