Domestic violence: 285,000 victims in 2025, and home is no refuge

According to Le Monde, which cites the interior ministry, 285,000 victims of domestic violence were recorded in 2025, or 5% more than the previous year. Women account for 84% of victims, and 85% of those accused are men. As every year, the paper notes, the pattern repeats.

At this stage, the wire report does not tell the whole story. We do not know, for instance, how much of the rise reflects more violence and how much reflects more complaints being registered. These are two different realities, and it would be dishonest to pick one without the data. What follows is our reading, not a fact established by these figures.

Let us ask the question across the kitchen table: what makes it possible to leave? A roof, first. An income, next. Someone to mind the children while the paperwork gets done. Yet all of that costs money, and this is precisely where austerity bites. When emergency accommodation is full, when rents eat up wages, when a nursery place is a lottery, the exit door exists on paper but stays bolted shut in real life.

This is what the concept of social reproduction helps us see. The work that produces people, caring, raising, feeding, looking after the elderly, is largely unpaid or poorly paid, and it falls disproportionately on women. When public health, childcare and housing services retreat, that work does not vanish: it is handed back to households. A woman already carrying the double day, often a part-time job and the home, has less room to break away from the person on whom the fragile family budget partly depends.

Angela Davis argued in Women, Race and Class that what truly relieves women is access to decently paid jobs and to public, affordable childcare. We would add, and this is our reading, housing. Economic independence is not a luxury: it is the material condition of safety.

This does not mean violence is explained by the economy, nor that abusers are not responsible. It is rooted first in a relationship of domination, and every act is the responsibility of the person who commits it. But precarity often decides who can get out, and at what cost.

The real test of the ministerial announcements that will follow these figures will therefore be simple: how many emergency places, how many posts in associations and social services, how many homes reserved. Statistics count the victims. Budgets show whether we actually want there to be fewer of them.