On data, underreporting, and why the invisibility of this problem is itself part of the problem
by Mike, founder, SoulForge Community
One question I get asked sometimes — and ask myself — is: how widespread is this, really?
How many men are actually going through domestic abuse, or parental alienation, or the family court in these circumstances? Are we talking about thousands of people? Tens of thousands? More?
The honest answer is: we know some of it, and we don’t know most of it. And the reasons we don’t know most of it are themselves important.
What the data actually shows
The most authoritative source of domestic abuse data in the UK is the Office for National Statistics, which publishes annual figures based on the Crime Survey for England and Wales. The most recent figures show that approximately 1.5 million men experienced domestic abuse in England and Wales in a single year — this is around 41% of all domestic abuse victims. It is estimated that around one in five men — 21.8% — have experienced domestic abuse in their lifetime.
Of those 1.5 million men who experienced domestic abuse in a given year, around 196,000 reported it to the police. That means roughly 1,300,000 men did not report — more than a million in a single year. And those are only the men who identified what was happening to them as domestic abuse in the first place.
On the parental alienation side, the data is much harder to pin down. Cafcass — the body that advises family courts on children’s welfare — received over 35,000 new private law children’s cases in the year to February 2025. Not all of these involve parental alienation, and not all parental alienation cases reach Cafcass. Research suggests parental alienation behaviours are present in 11–15% of contested child arrangement cases, but that estimate comes with real methodological caveats.
The underreporting problem
The figures above are significant. But they almost certainly undercount the true scale of what’s happening — and the reasons why tell us something important.
The Crime Survey asks people whether they have experienced domestic abuse. But if a man doesn’t recognise what’s been happening to him as domestic abuse — which, as we’ve discussed in a previous post, is common — he won’t identify it as such in a survey. The survey captures reported experience, not actual experience. And for male victims in particular, who often lack the cultural framework to name what’s happening to them, the gap between actual and reported experience may be substantial.
Similarly, police reporting figures capture only men who both recognised the abuse and chose to report it. Every barrier that exists to male help-seeking — shame, fear of not being believed, fear of losing the children, the cultural expectation of self-sufficiency — suppresses this number further.
Research by the ManKind Initiative and others consistently finds that male victims under-report at significantly higher rates than female victims. The reasons are structural and cultural, not personal failings. But the effect is that the official data systematically understates the scale of male victimisation.
The definitional problem
There’s a further complication with parental alienation specifically: the very concept is contested. Some organisations argue that what looks like parental alienation is often something else — a child’s legitimate response to a parent’s abusive behaviour, or a protective parent limiting contact for genuine safeguarding reasons. Others argue that parental alienation is a real and distinct pattern that is significantly underrecognized. To see the lack of agreement on this topic you only have to mention ’parental alienation’ to a family court lawyer for them to warn you about the problems using that term. The Courts, apparently, prefer the term ’alienating behaviours’ – which is just the same thing isn’t it. But the term ’parental alienation’ has become politically charged unfortunately.
This definitional dispute means that data on parental alienation is hard to compile and interpret. Different researchers, operating from different starting assumptions, arrive at very different figures. And the absence of agreed definitions makes systematic data collection at a policy level extremely difficult.
What I can say with confidence — from what the data does show — is that contested child arrangement cases in England and Wales are at record levels, that Cafcass is severely under-resourced relative to its caseload, and that the family court system takes years to resolve contested cases. The human cost behind those abstractions is enormous and largely invisible in public discourse. Most people would be shocked to hear what goes on in family court cases – and rightly so!
Why the invisibility is itself part of the problem
A problem that can’t be measured can’t be funded, can’t be provisioned for, and can’t be addressed at policy level. The inadequacy of the data on male domestic abuse and parental alienation is not a neutral fact — it is an active obstacle to addressing the harm.
When a government allocates funding to domestic abuse services, it does so based on evidence of need. When the evidence systematically undercounts male victimisation, the services allocated systematically underserve male victims. The 429 refuge spaces for men across England and Wales aren’t an accident. They’re partly a consequence of the data not being there to justify more.
The same logic applies to parental alienation. Without agreed definitions and robust data, it is difficult to make the policy case for better training for Cafcass officers, better resourcing for family courts, or formal recognition of parental alienation in law. The absence of data provides cover for inaction.
So what do we actually know?
We know that the scale is vast — far larger than public awareness would suggest. We know that underreporting is substantial, that the true figures are almost certainly higher than the official data captures, and that the structural reasons for underreporting are not going to resolve themselves without deliberate intervention.
We know that men going through these situations face a near-total absence of adequate support, that the family court system is critically under-resourced, and that the policy and professional landscape has not kept pace with the reality many men are living.
And we know that the invisibility of this problem is not neutral. Every year that passes without better data, better provision, and better public understanding is another year in which hundreds of thousands of men navigate something devastating on their own.
That’s partly what SoulForge Community is trying to change — and why amplifying these experiences through peer support, through the resources on this site, and through the project of gathering first-person accounts matters. The scale of this won’t be addressed until it can be seen clearly. Making it visible is part of the work.
For background on domestic abuse statistics for men, the ManKind Initiative maintains a comprehensive and regularly updated research library at mankind.org.uk. The Office for National Statistics annual domestic abuse publication is the authoritative source for UK data. For more on what SoulForge Community is building in response, see soulforge.org.uk/goals.
Mike, founder, SoulForge Community
SoulForge Community exists to support men navigating domestic abuse, parental alienation, and the family court system — and the longer work of rebuilding. Visit soulforge.org.uk.