Can strangulation laws reduce intimate partner violence and homicides?

Non-fatal strangulation is a dangerous and under-recognised form of domestic abuse, especially since it may leave little visible injury. Legislation that makes it a standalone offence will not only reduce violence inflicted on intimate partners, but also help to prevent escalation into homicide.

Non-fatal strangulation (NFS) – the obstruction of blood flow and/or breathing by external pressure to the neck – can cause severe internal injuries and long-term health complications. It is also one of the strongest warning signs of lethal domestic abuse: victims of NFS are more likely to be killed by their partner at a later date.

At least 20,000 people in the UK are victims of strangulation each year, but around 50% show no external injuries. As a result, the seriousness of the abuse is often missed or under-reported.

New research on the United States shows that recognising strangulation as a specific criminal offence significantly reduces intimate partner homicides. A new study on the UK compares NFS laws and provides cautious early evidence relevant to Scotland’s debate on creating a standalone offence.

What is the policy issue?

Domestic abuse is a pervasive social and public health problem (Adams et al, 2024). Globally, a large share of femicides – the killing of women or girls because of their gender – are committed by current or former partners.

One severe form of abuse, NFS, has drawn growing attention from clinicians, police, prosecutors and policy-makers – both for its effects on victims’ health and as it is a predictor of future abuse.

Strangulation is far more common than many people realise. Recent UK evidence suggests that at least 20,000 people experience strangulation each year, and up to one-third of domestic abuse service users report it (Institute for Addressing Strangulation, 2023a). Yet half of victims show no visible injury, making it easy for police and clinicians to miss it.

This is concerning as forensic evidence shows that strangulation is one of the strongest predictors of later intimate partner homicide (Glass et al, 2008). This is the case even when it leaves no visible injury.

Medical evidence also shows the dangers of strangulation. Loss of consciousness can occur in 6-8 seconds, and only 4-11 pounds per square inch (psi) of pressure – far less than the force needed to open a drink can – is required to compress the major blood vessels in the neck (Institute for Addressing Strangulation, 2023b).

Despite this, until recently, many legal systems have not treated strangulation as a specific crime. Cases were often recorded as ‘common assault’, if recorded at all, attracting relatively low penalties and limited police intervention.

Since the early 2000s, nearly all US states have passed strangulation laws. In the UK, standalone NFS offences have been in force in England and Wales since 2022 and in Northern Ireland since 2023. In addition, in March 2026, Jersey adopted a new law to make NFS a standalone criminal offence.

Scotland is debating whether to do the same, with the issue recently being raised in Holyrood. Scottish Parliament motion S6M-19504, debated in January 2026, cites new research discussed here, which finds that NFS laws in the United States led to substantial reductions in intimate partner homicides.

The motion argues that the absence of a comparable offence in Scotland may represent a gap in current legislation and calls for consideration of a Scottish NFS offence. The Scottish government has also opened a consultation on improving protections in the justice system for women and girls, including questions on the current law, better recording of NFS cases and public awareness of the dangers of NFS.

This raises a simple question for policy-makers: do strangulation laws save lives?

Do existing policies affect rates of abuse?

Evidence shows that criminal justice policies can influence domestic abuse and related harms:

‘No-drop’ prosecution policies – those that require prosecutors to proceed with a case even if the victim is unwilling to testify – have reduced intimate partner homicides (Aizer and Dal Bó, 2009).
Increasing the share of women police officers reduces both male and female victim homicide, by encouraging victims to report abuse and by improving police responses (Miller and Segal, 2019). This can interrupt escalating violence, reducing both killings of women by abusive partners and cases in which abused women kill their abusers in self-defence or in defence of their children (Miller and Segal, 2019; Saunders, 2002).
Domestic violence arrests can reduce re-offending (Black et al, 2023; Amaral et al, 2023).
Policies affecting relationship dynamics – such as divorce laws, abortion access and labour market conditions – also affect patterns of abuse. For example, job loss among either men or women has been shown to increase domestic violence in Brazil. Unemployment benefits do not reduce violence while paid, and they may increase risks after their expiry because longer unemployment raises victims’ exposure to perpetrators (Bhalotra et al, 2025).

But until recently, there has been no causal evidence on whether specific strangulation laws reduce lethal violence.

What might be the effects of a non-fatal strangulation law?

New research shows that specific strangulation laws reduce the number of intimate partner homicides. The work analyses the introduction of NFS statutes across the United States between 2000 and 2019. It compares rates of intimate partner homicides in different states as the staggered rollout of these laws took place, using a technique of modern quantitative economics known as the two-stage difference-in-differences approach (Gardner et al, 2025).

In simple terms, the method compares intimate partner homicides in states after they introduced an NFS law with an estimate of what would have happened in those same states without the law. This counterfactual is based on differences across states and common changes over time, estimated using observations from states and years in which no NFS law had yet been introduced.

Among adults aged 18-49 – the group most exposed to intimate partner violence – this research shows that:

Female victim homicides fall from 1.22 to 1.05 per 100,000 population after NFS laws take effect.
Male victim homicides fall from 0.34 to 0.25 per 100,000 population.

Figure 1: Estimated impact of NFS law on intimate partner homicide

Source: Based on Table 3 from de Assis et al, 2025.
Note: This figure shows the rate of intimate partner homicide (IPH) per 100,000 people.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that from enactment through to 2019, these laws have prevented approximately 1,029 female and 547 male intimate partner homicides among adults aged 18-49.

Consistent with prior research on improved policing of domestic violence against women (Miller and Segal, 2019), NFS laws may reduce homicide rates among male victims as well. One plausible explanation is that some male intimate partner homicide victims are abusive partners killed by women who use lethal force in self-defence or in defence of their children after prolonged abuse (Saunders, 2002).

These findings still apply when taking account of how baseline differences in poverty, unemployment, income per capita and the men-women unemployment ratio shape intimate partner homicide trends over time.

What’s more, despite the effect of these laws on the rate of intimate partner homicides, they seem to have no impact on homicides committed by strangers. This indicates that the law’s effects operate through domestic violence dynamics within intimate partner relationships rather than broader crime trends. This aligns with expectations, as NFS reflects escalation and coercive control within relationships, and these dynamics are absent in stranger-perpetrated homicides (Thomas et al, 2014; Patch et al, 2018).

Figure 2: Estimated impact of NFS law on homicides committed by strangers

Source: Based on Table 4 from de Assis et al, 2025.
Note: This figure shows the rate of stranger-perpetrated homicides (SH) per 100,000 people.

How do strangulation laws reduce homicides?

This research suggests that NFS laws operate, at least in part, by enabling earlier police intervention in cases involving strangulation and by creating a clearer basis for charging and prosecution.

After these laws are introduced, the share of reported intimate partner violence cases recorded as aggravated assault increases by about 5.5 percentage points for women aged 18-49 (from 8% to 13%). This pattern is consistent with improved police understanding of strangulation and clearer statutory guidance. Further, among incidents classified as aggravated assault, arrests rise by around 12 percentage points for female victims (from 48% to 60%).

Because these estimates are based on reported intimate partner violence incidents, they may partly reflect changes in reporting, police classification, agency coverage or the composition of reported cases. For this reason, they should be interpreted as suggestive evidence on the mechanism rather than definitive proof. Still, the findings are consistent with NFS laws helping to prevent abusive relationships from escalating into lethal violence.

What is happening in the UK today?

To understand what this might mean for the UK, a recent working paper examines how NFS and suffocation are treated in criminal law across England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. It also provides early evidence on whether the introduction of a standalone offence in England and Wales is associated with changes in intimate partner homicide.

In England and Wales, a standalone offence of strangulation or suffocation was introduced through the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 and came into force in June 2022 (Bows and Herring, 2024). Northern Ireland introduced a related offence of non-fatal strangulation or asphyxiation, which came into effect in June 2023.

Scotland does not currently have a standalone NFS offence. Instead, strangulation-type conduct is addressed through broader legal routes, including the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018, common law assault, attempted murder and sexual offences where relevant.

These differences in legal frameworks provide an opportunity to examine whether specifically recognising strangulation as an offence is associated with changes in intimate partner homicide. The study constructs a jurisdiction-year panel for England/Wales and Scotland covering the fiscal years 2013/14 to 2024/25, using official homicide statistics and population estimates.

The early evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive. In the years after the offence came into force in England and Wales, average annual female victim intimate partner homicide counts fell from 74.00 to 58.67, while the corresponding figure in Scotland fell only slightly, from 6.33 to 6.00.

This implies a difference-in-differences estimate of around 15 fewer female victim intimate partner homicides per year in England and Wales relative to Scotland. For male victim intimate partner homicides, there is no comparable pattern: there is essentially no effect.

When the outcomes are expressed as rates per 100,000 people, the results are weaker. Female victim intimate partner homicide rates decline more in England and Wales than in Scotland, but the estimated difference is not statistically precise. There is no evidence of a relative decline in male victim rates in England and Wales.

These comparisons should be interpreted cautiously. The analysis is based on only two jurisdictions, a short post-reform period and rare annual homicide outcomes. Scotland’s annual figures are also more volatile because of its smaller population.

In addition, the gap in female victim homicide counts between England/Wales and Scotland was already narrowing before the reform, raising a diagnostic concern about whether, absent the NFS law in England and Wales, the two series would have followed parallel paths in the post-treatment period.

Figure 3: Trends in intimate partner homicide by sex and jurisdiction

Source: Figure 1 from Cherkassky et al, 2026.
Note: This figure shows the intimate partner homicide rates per 100,000 population over time (fiscal year). The vertical dashed line marks 2022/23, the first post-reform fiscal year; because the England and Wales NFS offence commenced on 7 June 2022, this is a partial post-commencement year. E&W denotes England and Wales; SCO denotes Scotland.

What are the implications for policy in Scotland?

While caution is needed when drawing conclusions from preliminary descriptive UK trends, the emerging evidence from the United States provides guidance for policy-makers considering a standalone NFS offence in Scotland.

This research does not prove what a standalone Scottish NFS offence would do. Rather, the policy relevance is that it highlights a key legal distinction. Scotland already has substantial criminal law tools for serious domestic abuse, but it lacks offence-specific recognition of NFS as a discrete high-risk act.

A dedicated offence could matter not only because of sentencing powers, but also because it may improve legal labelling, recording, charging routes and institutional understanding of strangulation as a serious risk factor for lethal violence.

The central message from emerging international evidence is that legal recognition of non-fatal strangulation can be a tool for preventing the most serious forms of domestic abuse.