A fifth of Crown Prosecution cases are alleged sex crimes or domestic abuse. In fact, the proportion compared to all prosecutions has nearly trebled in the last decade.
Alleged sex crimes and domestic abuse offences now account for nearly 20% of cases pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service compared to just under 8% a decade ago.
Prosecutions for sexual offences excluding rape reached a new peak of 13,490 in the latest financial year, while the number of rape prosecutions completed rose from 4,643 in 2015-16 to a record 5,190 in 2016-17.
It’s also worth noting that the successful prosecution rate has increased to around 75%
Why the proportionate rise in prosecutions?
There seems to be at least three main reasons:
Firstly, there’s more reporting of sexual and domestic violence – the rise of prosecutions are in line with a sharp jump in reports of sexual abuse to police seen in recent years in the wake of high-profile investigations launched after the Jimmy Savile scandal.
Secondly, authorities are also mounting increasing numbers of investigations involving the internet, including child sexual abuse, harassment and revenge pornography cases. For example the number of prosecutions sparked by alleged revenge porn – the disclosure of private sexual photographs or films without consent – more than doubled from 206 to 465 in the last year.
Thirdly, new laws have been introduced, criminalising a broader range of offences – for example a new law introduced to clamp down on domestic abusers whose conduct stops short of physical violence, such as those who control their victims through the internet and social media: there have been 309 alleged offences of controlling or coercive behaviour charged since the legislation was introduced at the end of 2015.
HOWEVER, there are some areas where prosecutors could do better:
There were year-on-year falls in prosecutions for “honour-based” violence and forced marriage, the report shows, while there were no prosecutions for female genital mutilation – it’s unlikely that there were no cases of the later in the last year in the UK.
The research which tracked more than 10,000 teenagers found widespread emotional problems among today’s youth, with misery, loneliness and self-hate rife.
24 per cent of 14-year-old girls and 9% of 17-year-old boys reported high levels of depressive symptoms compared to only 9% of boys.
However, when parents were asked about their perceptions of mental-health problems in their children, only 9% of parents reported that their 14 year old girls had any mental health issue, compared to 12% of boys. (Possibly because boys manifest in more overt ways, or because boys are simply under-reporting)
Anna Feuchtwang, NCB chief executive said: “This study of thousands of children gives us the most compelling evidence available about the extent of mental ill health among children in the UK, and Lead author of the study Dr Praveetha Patalay said the mental health difficulties faced by girls had reached “worryingly high” proportions.
Ms Feuchtwang said: “Worryingly there is evidence that parents may be underestimating their daughters’ mental health needs.
Dr Marc Bush, chief policy adviser at the charity YoungMinds, said: “We know that teenage girls face a huge range of pressures, including stress at school, body image issues, bullying and the pressure created by social media.
The above data is based on more than 10,000 children born in 2000/01 who are taking part in the Millennium Cohort Study.
Parents were questioned about their children’s mental health when their youngsters were aged three, five, seven, 11 and 14. When the participants were 14, the children were themselves asked questions about mental health difficulties.
The research showed that girls and boys had similar levels of mental ill-health throughout childhood, but stark differences were seen between gender by adolescence, when problems became more prevalent in girls.
Variations by class and ethnicity
Among 14-year-old girls, those from mixed race (28.6%) and white (25.2%) backgrounds were most likely to be depressed, with those from black African (9.7%) and Bangladeshi (15.4%) families the least likely to suffer from it.
Girls that age from the second lowest fifth of the population, based on family income, were most likely to be depressed (29.4%), while those from the highest quintile were the least likely (19.8%).
The research also showed that children from richer families were less likely to report depression compared to poorer peers.
Links to Sociology
What you make of this data very much depends on how much you trust it – if you take it at face value, then it seems that poor white girls are suffering a real crisis in mental health, which suggests we need urgent research into why this is… and possibly some extra cash to help deal with it.
Again, if you accept the data, possibly the most interesting question here is why do black African girls have such low rates of depression compared to white girls?
Of course you also need to be skeptical about this data – it’s possible that boys are under-reporting, given the whole ‘masculinity thing’.
On the question of what we do about all of this, many of the articles point to guess what sector….. the education sector to sort out the differences. So once again, it’s down to schools to sort out the mess caused by living in a frantic post-modern society, on top of, oh yeah, educating!
Finally, there’s an obvious critical link to Toxic Childhood – this shows you that the elements of toxic childhood are not evenly distributed – poor white girls get it much worse than rich white girls, African British girls, and boys.
Sources and a note on media bias
You might want to read through the two articles below – note how the stats on class and ethnicity feature much more prominently in the left wing Guardian and yet how the right wing Telegraph doesn’t even mention ethnicity and drops in one sentence about class at the the end of the article without mentioning the stats.
From lower educational attainment to poor mental health, poverty negatively affects life chances in several ways.
Being in poverty has a negative effect on an individual’s life chances. Being poor means you are more likely to…
struggle to pay the bills and be financially vulnerable.
have to rent rather than buying your own house, which is correlated with poverty.
have to rely on Free School Meals for your children, which is correlated with lower educational achievement.
suffer poor health throughout your life and lower life expectancy.
suffer mental health problems throughout your life.
end up getting stuck in a debt-cycle, where you pay more to service the debt.
This post explores some of the statistical evidence on the relationship between poverty and life chances, looking at a range of evidence collected by the office for national statistics and other agencies such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The point of this post is simply to provide an overview of the statistics, and offer a critique of the limitations of these statistics. I’ll also provide some links to useful sources which students can then use to explore the data further.
What is Poverty?
There are different definitions and measurements of poverty, but one of the most widely used in the UK is relative poverty after housing costs (AHC). If household income is below 60% of the median household’s income, adjusted for family size and composition, they are in relative poverty.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation uses this measure along with two other thresholds, tracking relative poverty using a total of three poverty thresholds.
Poverty threshold: 60% of median income
Deep poverty threshold: 50% of median income
Very deep poverty threshold: 40% of median income.
Relative poverty thresholds for 2020/2021
These are adjusted for household composition to reflect the different costs of living alone, compared to living in a couple, and with children.
Weekly median income 2020/2021
Poverty threshold (60% of median)
Deep poverty threshold (50% of median)
Very deep poverty threshold (40% of median)
Single adult, no children
£274
£164
£137
£109
Couple two children
£472
£283
£236
£189
Lone parent, two children*
£566
£340
£283
£226
Couple two children*
£764
£458
£382
£306
*Assumes one child is aged under 14 and one 14 years or older.
According to this measurement there were 13.5 million people, or 20% of the U.K. population living in low-income households in 2020 /21.
Life chances
Life chances are your chances of achieving positive outcomes and avoiding negative outcomes throughout the course of your life – such as succeeding in education, being happy, or avoiding divorce, poor health and an early death.
Five ways poverty affects life chances
Poverty negatively affects people’s life chances. Being poor means…
You struggle to pay the bills (having to choose between heating or eating).
You have to pay rent rather than owning your own home.
You’re kids are more likely to fail their GCSEs.
You were more likely to die from Covid.
You’re more likely to suffer from poor mental health.
Poverty means you can’t pay the bills
Those earning lower incomes are more likely to struggle to pay their bills and suffer from other forms of financial vulnerability.
Someone earning £10 000 a year is twice as likely to report not being able to save or struggling to pay the energy bills compared to someone earning £50 000 a year, and four times more likely to report not being able to afford unexpected expenses.
56% of adults earning less than £10 000 a year reported that they found it difficult to afford energy bills compared to only 26% of adults earning more than £50 000 a year.
38% said they were unable to afford hidden expenses compared to 10% of the richest quintile.
Those with lower incomes are almost three times as likely to report being depressed compared to those with higher incomes.
6% of people in the lowest quintile of earners report being depressed compared to 2% of those in the highest quintile of earners.
Those in the lowest quintile are also more likely to report ‘lacking energy’ or ‘feeling worthless’, and more likely to report a number of conditions which correlate with poor mental health.
Some useful links to good teaching resources for Globalisation and Global Development.
Good resources providing an overview of global trends and global inequalities:
Firstly, this 2016 video imagines the world as 100 people, and so illustrates what percentage of people live on less than $2 a day and so on (once you get through the ‘basic’ stuff on ethnicity/ religion etc…
A few stand-out facts are:
1% of the population own 50% of the world’s wealth
15% don’t have access to clean water
less than 50% have access to the internet
Secondly, Worldometers provides real time world statistics on population, the environment, food, health and media and society.
A few stand-out facts are…..
The total number of malnourished people in the world is decreasing!
The total number of people with no access to clean drinking water is also decreasing!
HOWEVER, we’re losing approximately 20 HA a minute to desertification and 10 HA a minute to deforestation, which could undermine both of the above in the future.
Good resources for researching individual countries
The United Nation’s Country Profiles are probably the most accessible place to start – each country’s page gives you basic development indicators which you can then click on to expand.
The World Bank’s Open Data is also useful – follow the link and you can either search or browse by country.
The CIA World Fact Book is a useful source for more qualitative information on a country by country by country basis, organised into various categories such as geography, population, economics, politics and so on…
Good Resources for tracking ‘Indicators of Development’
The United Nations Human Development Report – Data – click on the links to the left to access tables which rank countries according to the basic Human Development Index, the Gender Equality Index and more.
According to both Police Recorded Crime and the Crime Survey of England and Wales, there has been a steady decrease in crime in England and Wales since 1995 – that’s over 20 years of crime reduction.
There are several possible reasons behind this decrease in crime (IF you believe the statistics, of course!)
The Relative Decrease in Property Crime since 1995
Trends in Property Crime – Crime Survey of England and Wales
The Office For National Statistics identifies seven existing theories/ pieces of evidence for why property crime has fallen. Read them through and consider how many of them support Rational Choice Theory.
ONE – The rise in the use of the internet has roughly coincided with falls in crime
In 1995, use of the internet was not widespread. As it became more popular, it may have helped to occupy young people’s time when they may otherwise have turned to crime. Farrell et al., 2011 suggests the internet also provides more opportunity for online crime – which possibly explains the increase in Fraud in recent years, although this may be down to improvements in detection and recording of this offence.
TWO – Reduced consumption of drugs and alcohol is likely to have resulted in a drop in offending
A 2014 Home Office research paper ‘The heroin epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s and its effect on crime trends – then and now’ supports the notion that the changing levels of opiate and crack-cocaine use have affected acquisitive crime trends in England and Wales, potentially explaining over half of the rise in crime in the 1980s to mid-1990s and between a quarter and a third of the fall in crime since the mid-1990s. (Bunge et al., 2005).
THREE – Significant improvements in forensic and other crime scene investigation techniques and record keeping
Advancements in areas such as fingerprinting and DNA testing may have led to a reduction in crime.perceived risk to offenders may have increased, inducing a deterrent effect (Explaining and sustaining the crime drop: Clarifying the role of opportunity-related theories, Farrell et al., 2010).
FOUR – The increase in abortions
The ONS also site this classic study by Levitt et al – which suggested that the introduction of legalised abortion on a wide number of grounds in the US meant that more children who might have been born into families in poverty or troubled environments and be more prone to get drawn into criminality, would not be born and therefore be unable to commit these crimes (The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime, Donohue and Levitt, 2001).
FIVE – Changes (real or perceived) in technology and infrastructure.
This includes an increase in the use of situational crime prevention technieques such as CCTV, which may act as deterrents to committing crime (CCTV has modest impact on crime, Welsh and Farrington, 2008).
SIX – Longer Prison Sentences
The impacts of longer prison sentences and police activity on reducing crime, particularly property crimes, are likely to act as deterrents (Acquisitive Crime: Imprisonment, Detection and Social Factors, Bandyopadhyay et al., 2012).
SEVEN – Target Hardening
Increased quality of building and vehicle security is also likely to have been a factor in the reduction in property crime. This concept of ‘target-hardening’ which makes targets (that is, anything that an offender would want to steal or damage) more resistant to attack is likely to deter offenders from committing crime (Opportunities, Precipitators and Criminal Decisions: A reply to Wortley’s critique of situational crime prevention, Cornish and Clarke, 2003).
Findings from the CSEW add some evidence which may support this, indicating that alongside the falls in property crime, there were also improvements in household and vehicle security. Since 1995, there have been statistically significant increases in the proportion of households in the 2014/15 CSEW with:
Window locks (up 21 percentage points from 68% to 89% of households)
Light timers/sensors (up 16 percentage points from 39% to 55% of households)
Burglar alarms (up 11 percentage points from 20% to 31% of households)
The ONS also notes that it does not endorse any one of the theories over the others and that many of these theories are contested and subject to continuing discussion and debate.
NB – Just because most of the above theories seem to offer broad support for RTC and RAT theories, doesn’t mean there aren’t other factors that need to be considered when explaining the decrease in property crime.
Evidence from Kat Banyard (2010) The equality illusion– the truth about women and men today, Faber and Faber.
Today it is normal for women to worry about their looks. Girls have starkly different relationships to their bodies than boys – they put greater emphasis on how attractive their bodies are to others – for boys physical prowess – what he can actually achieve is more important than looks. Banyard cites the following evidence to support her view that women are more concerned about their looks than men –
1. 1.5 million people in the UK have an eating disorder – 90% of them women and girls
2. A survey conducted by Dove of 3000 women found that 90% of them wanted to change some aspect of their body with body weight and shape being the main concern.
3. One in four women has considered plastic surgery.
4. An analysis of animated cartoons shows that female characters are far more likely to be portrayed as physically attractive than male characters and those who are attractive are far more likely to be portrayed as intelligent, employed, happy, loving and involved in kissing and hugging.
5. In 2007 a survey of Brownies aged 7-10 were asked to describe ‘planet sad’ they spoke of it being inhabited by girls who were fat and bullied about their appearance.
6. A survey conducted in 2009 found that a quarter of girls thought it was more important to be beautiful than clever. – Youngpoll.com
7. The more mainstream media high school students watch, the more they believe beauty is important according to the American Psychological Association.
8. The media furore over Susan Boyle was mainly because she didn’t conform to the female stereotype of beauty.
9. In 2009 the Bank of England held a seminar for its female employees called ‘dress for success’ – where they were informed, amongst other things, to ‘always wear make up’, there was no such equivalent for men
10. Some studies have shown that the more a girl monitors her appearance, the less satisfied she will be with her appearance.
11. Two thirds of women report having avoided activities such as going swimming or going to a party because they feel bad about their appearance while 16% of 15 -17 year olds have avoided going to school for the same reason.
12. One experiment found that female students performed worse in maths tests when wearing a swim suit compared to regular clothes while boy’s performance doesn’t decrease under the same conditions
Analysis – what Banyard actually thinks is wrong/ harmful about this situation…
‘The existence of a suffocating ideal of beauty has persisted and it has remained a gendered phenomenon. Women are judged on their ability to conform to a beauty ideal – there is a cultural pressure to manipulate their bodies to fit into a pre-existing ideal – to treat your body as an object that will be consumed by an observing public (This is known as objectification)
While some Feminists argue that the Feminine pursuit of beauty is simply a matter of choice – women freely choose to do it (Baumgardner) others (Jefferys) argue that the practise of beautification reflect and perpetuate gender inequalities – women put effort into displaying their femininity/ sexuality because they are relatively powerless – and those women that do engage in the practise of beautification perpetuate the idea that a woman’s value is in her beauty.
Millions of girls and women begin their days with beautification rituals because their sense of self hinges on the gaze of others. If your sense of self esteem depends on what you think others think of your appearance, can you really be said to have freedom of choice? Also, can you really say women are equal to men in this respect?
One of the reasons for the persistent problems of body image faced by females is that girls are taught from a very young age that their physical appearance is a reflection of their worth and value, and treated accordingly.
The richest 10% are 133 times wealthier than the poorest 10%. This post explores statistics on wealth and income inequalities in the UK
The wealthiest 10% of households in the UK are 133 times richer than the poorest 10% of households (1).
The disposable income of the richest 20% of households is 4.5 times greater than the poorest 20% (2).
Wealth Inequalities in the UK
In 2018-2022:
The richest 1% of households had a median wealth of more than £3.6 million.
The richest 10% of households had a median wealth of £1.9 million.
The poorest 10% of households had a median wealth of just £15,400.
This means the wealthiest 10% of households were 130 times richer than the poorest 10% of households. The wealthiest 10% were 233 times richer.
Components of wealth
As measured by the ONS wealth is made up of four main components:
Pensions
Property
Other physical assets
Cash savings
For the wealthiest households, private pensions make up a more significant portion of wealth. Pensions as a proportion of wealth becomes less significant the poorer the household is.
In middle-wealth households, property is the most significant proportion of wealth.
This probably means that for the ‘middle wealthy’ they are not as affluent as may appear. Most of these people will live in those households, no income is derived from that portion of their wealth. In contrast, pension wealth, which wealthier households have a lot more of, yields an income.
Trends in wealth distribution
The wealth of the richest 10% of households has decreased in the very long term. In 1900, the top 10% controlled over 50% of wealth. This declined to a low of 26.5% in 1970, but then increased to 38.7% in 2013. The proportion of wealth controlled by the top 10% has declined slightly over the last decade (3)
In 2021 the top 10% controlled 35.7% of wealth, compared to the bottom 50% who controlled only 20.4% of wealth.
According the Equality Trust, by 2023, the richest 50 families in the UK held more wealth than half of the UK population, comprising 33.5 million people.
Income inequalities in the UK 2022
Median equivalized disposable income for the richest 20% of households was £66002 in 2022, compared to £14508 for the poorest 20% of households (2).
This means the richest 20% of households had an income 4.5 times greater than the poorest 20% of households.
Disposable income is income after taxes and benefits. Equivalized means income is adjusted to take account of household composition because costs are different for single people, couples and families.
60% of this median income is £19409 which means that every single one of those households in the bottom quintile is in poverty, as are around half of the households in the second quintile.
It should be no surprise based on the above distribution that 13.4 million people or 20% of the population were living in poverty in 2020/2021.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation also has measures of deep poverty, set at 50% of median income at £16174 a year and very deep poverty, at 40% or just under £13 000 a year.
Poverty has deepened in recent years, with more people falling into deep and very deep poverty. Based on the above distribution for example every household in the bottom quintile is in deep poverty, some will be in very deep poverty!
A more detailed income distribution
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has developed an online calculator where you can enter your income to see where you fit in to the distribution in the UK.
If you enter your income and costs you will show up as a red bar. (My screen capture below doesn’t show a red bar as I entered a fake high income, so my bar is off the scale to the right!).
What the graphic below shows is how many millions of people earn roughly what weekly income. Each bar represents an increase in income of around £7.
I put two arrows in to demonstrate that most people receive between £200 and £550 per week.
You can also see from the above bar chart that there are more people clustered towards the middle-left. Relatively few people have very high incomes!
The different shades of green are just to make the graphic easier to read.
All of the people in the first light shade of green to the left will classify as being in very deep poverty, with incomes of less than £190 a week.
Trends in income inequality
Disposable income inequality has increased considerably since 1977. As measured by the Gini Coefficient, income inequality has increased from 24.5% in 1977 to 34.7% in 2022 (4).
The Gini coefficient takes values between 0% and 100%, with higher values representing an increase in the level of inequality. A value of 0% indicates complete equality, a value of 100% complete inequality. A 100% score would mean one person (or household) has all the income.
Signposting and related posts
Poverty is a concept that is often linked with wealth (you might crudely say that poverty is the opposite of wealth).
Wealth and income inequalities are closely correlated with social class, although economic measurements are just one indicator of social class, which is a broader concept, also encompassing social and cultural capital (if we are going to use the latest social class survey – see here for an introduction to the concept of social class.
The two main sources of official statistics on Crime in the UK (or rather England and Wales!) are:
Police Recorded Crime – which is all crimes recorded by the 43 police forces in England and Wales (as well as the British Transport Police)
The Crime Survey for England and Wales which is a face to face victim survey in which people are asked about their experiences of crime in the previous 12 months.
NB – There are other sources of official statistics on crime, which I’ll come back to later, but these are the two main ones.
Below are three very good web sites which you can use to explore crime stats from the above two sources. The point of this post is really just to direct students to good sources which they can use to explore these statistics (strengths and limitations of crime statistics posts will be forthcoming shortly!)
Published by the Office for National Statistics, Crime in England and Wales provides the most comprehensive coverage of national crime trends. I’d actually recommend starting with the methodology section of this document, which states
‘Crime in England and Wales has 2 main data sources: The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW)and police recorded crime. The CSEW is a face-to-face victimisation survey in which people are asked about their experiences of crime in the 12 months prior to the interview. Police recorded crime figures are supplied by the 43 territorial police forces of England and Wales and the British Transport Police.’
This is a good starting point for exploring crime statistics. You can click on an interactive map which will show you how much crime there is in your area. NB this map shows you only police recorded crime, and there are many, many crimes which are not recorded, for various reasons.
This site describes itself as ‘the leading crime and property data’ website – scroll down for a nice colour coded analysis of crime trends for a number of different crime categories. Reported month by month (2 month data lag). I think the table below is CSEW data
What I particularly like about this web site is that it provides data tables by police force – Here’s a link to data for the Surrey Police (Local link, I teach in Surrey, where my measly teacher salary makes me feel poor because of the sickening and unjustified wealth in the local area.) The data below is Police Recorded Crime data.
When looking at statistics on crime, make sure you know whether the stats come from Police Recorded Crime or the Crime Survey of England and Wales (a victim survey) – the two figures will be different, and the difference between them will be different depending on the type of crime – for example the stats for vehicle theft are quite similar (because of insurance claims requiring a police report) but domestic violence figures are very different from these two sources because most offences do not get reported to the police, but many more (but not all) get reported to the CSEW researchers.
According to the Global Gender Gap Index, the United Kingdom is one of the most gender equal countries in the world, but if you drill down into the statistics, women and men appear to both more and less equal than the headline data suggests.
The BBC’s ‘How equal are you?’ interactive infographic allows you type in any country and see how equal men are to women across a range of different indicators – These statistics come from the latest Global Gender Gap Index, produced by the World Economic Forum which analyses more than a dozen datasets in order to compare gender inequality in 144 countries.
For example in the UK we are told that:
The UK ranks 18/ 145 in the world for gender equality.
However, women are still not equal to men
For every £100 a man earns, a woman earns £83
43% of graduates are male (the only statistic where women appear to be outperforming men.
72% of women and 83% of men are either in work or looking for work (so I assume from this we can imply that women are slightly more likely to take on the caring role)
Just a quick glance at the above chart should be sufficient to demonstrate some of the flaws in the Global Gender Gap Index:
We rank 68th out of 144 for primary school enrolment – we couldn’t get any better but I’m guessing we’re brought down because there must be 67 developing countries where more girls are enrolled in primary school than boys (making up for years of gender discrimination)
We rank 1st for sex ratio at birth – OK I know it’s lower in many developing countries because of female infanticide, but in the many countries where this simply isn’t significant, surely we’re just being rewarded here for very minor ‘luck of the draw differences’ in child sex at birth?
We’re 81st for healthy life expectancy – surely here were just being penalised for women suffering from degenerative conditions linked to longer life expectancy compared to men’s? Surely this is a problem of low male life expectancy?
Also, if you look at our real ranking success story – we’re effectively first in the world for gender equality in education, the real story is that despite ranking first in the world for gender equality in education, these gains have not been translated into economic, political or health advantages. This is hardly good for women.
Our other great gender equality success story is the number of years with a female prime minister – Thatcher in other words. Given that Thatcher = neoliberalism and neoliberalism = increasing inequality, there’s plenty of disagreement over the extent to which this particular indicator can be interpreted as being positive for women.
There’s quite a few other things these stats don’t tell you – for example, there are enormous differences in the gender pay gap by age:
There’s also been enormous, rapid progress with women moving into Politics in increasing numbers…. The Gender Gap Index hasn’t been around long enough to show you this….
Male to Female Ratio of MPs in the UK 2015
So how useful is the Global Gender Gap Index?
I’ll be honest, I’m not particularly interested in the issue of gender inequality, so I’m not particularly passionate about tracking down criticisms of data sets related to the issue, but it’s only taken me 30 minutes to find seven criticisms of the validity of this particular data applied to the UK, so I’m left wondering whether these world rankings have any meaning at all?
The diversity of families and households in the UK has been slowly increasing since 2012. Types of families on the rise include cohabiting households, reconstituted families, single-parent families, and ‘kidult’ households where adults live with their parents. There’s been a slight decrease in traditional ‘cereal packet’ families. Multigenerational households, however, saw a minor decrease, making up only 1% of households in 2022. Single-person households and lone-parent families also increased marginally yet represent significant proportions of UK households.
Families and households in the UK have become more diverse since 2012, although the rate of change is relatively slow paced. The types of family and households which have increased since the 1950s include:
cohabiting rather than married households
reconstituted or step families
lone parent families
single person households
Kidult households, where adult children live with their parents.
The statistics below focus more on the trends in the last decade.
A slight decrease in ‘cereal packet’ families
The proportion of opposite-sex non-married cohabiting family households increased in the last decades, from 15.7% of all family households in the UK to 18.4% of all households in the UK.
There was a corresponding decrease in opposite-sex married family households: from 67% of all households to 65.2% of all households (2).
The proportion of ‘cereal packet families’ is slowly declining.
An important analysis point here is that the rate of decline is not particularly fast or significant.
Opposite-sex married and cohabitating families together make up 81% of all family households.
In other words around 80% of households with children are still heterosexual two parent households!
Trends in Reconstituted Families
In 2011 there were 544,000 step families with dependent children in England and Wales.
This means that 11% of couple families with dependent children were step families.
The Number of step families has increased since the 1950s.
However, the number of step families has declined recently dropping from 631,000 in 2001 to just 544,000 in 2011.
If there is only one biological parent in the step-family, that parent is the mother rather than the father in 90% of cases.
NB it is more difficult to get up to date stats on step-families! However according to this Guardian article from 2021 an estimated 1 in 3 families are blended families. NB this is probably including families with non dependent children.
Trends in Lone Parent Households
There were 2.9 million lone-parent families in the UK in 2022, which is 15% of all families.
This is down slightly from 2012 when there were 3.0 million lone-parent families, representing 17% of all families
84% of lone-parent families were lone-mother families in 2022.
See source (2) below.
Separated Families
A separated family is defined as ‘one parent with care of a child 16 or under, or child aged under 20 if they are in full time Further Education, and with a non-resident parent’.
In 2020 there were an estimated 2.3 million separated families in Britain, with an estimated 3.6 million children.
89% of parents with care in 2020 were female and under the age 50, and 86% of the non-resident parents male and 80% were under 50.
Methodological note: Lone parent and separated families are not quite. the same thing!
Trends in Single Person Households
29.6% of all households in the UK were single person households in 2022.
This is equivalent to 8.3 million people or 13% of people who live in households.
This is up slightly from 2012 when 29% of all households were single person households.
According to Euromonitor International, the number of people living alone globally is skyrocketing, rising from about 153 million in 1996 to 277 million in 2011 – an increase of around 80% in 15 years.
Trends in ‘Kidult’ Households
The number of adults living with their parents rose by over 14% between 2011 and 2021 to 4.9 million adults.
Young adult males are more likely to live with their parents than young adult females.
In 2022 31% of males aged 20-34 lived with their parents compared to only 22% of females aged 20 to 34. (Source).
Overall, around 1/3 of adult men and 1/5th of adult women in the UK now live with their parents.
Trends in Multigenerational Households
Only 1% of households were multigenerational in the UK in 2022.
This is down slightly from 2012 when the figure was 1.1%.
For more posts on this topic area more generally please see my page on families and households, one of the options within the first year of A-level sociology (AAQA).
