Definition
Family crime is the category of offences that occur between members of the same household — intimate-partner violence, child physical and sexual abuse, elder abuse, coercive control, financial exploitation of dependants. The label gathers a set of harms long treated as private matters and reframes them as crimes that the state has the responsibility, and frequently fails, to prevent and prosecute.
The category took its modern shape in the 1970s, when feminist refuge movements, child-protection campaigners, and emerging victim surveys demonstrated that the home was statistically the most dangerous place for many women and children. Subsequent legislation — domestic-violence laws, mandatory reporting, coercive-control offences — built on the recognition that the family unit can be a site of crime, not merely a refuge from it.
Why it matters
How it works
Researchers use victim surveys, refuge data, and case-file analysis to estimate prevalence, since police records capture only the offences that survive the reporting filter. Patterns are stable across jurisdictions: women are the majority of intimate-partner violence victims; children's risk concentrates in households with multiple stressors; elder abuse rises with dependency and isolation. The under-reporting itself is informative — it maps where social control collapses inside the family.
Policy responses split between criminal-justice routes (arrest, prosecution, protective orders) and welfare routes (refuges, social services, restorative practices), with continuing debate over which combination protects victims without entrenching state surveillance of marginalised families. Feminist, anti-racist, and disability-justice scholarship has refined the field by showing how race, immigration status, and disability shape both vulnerability and the system's response.