It’s very hard to find a solid, global percentage for how many reported cases of domestic abuse involving strangulation end up in fatalities, for a few reasons: under-reporting, differences in definitions, and lack of consistent data. But here’s what recent research (especially from the UK) shows, and some estimates that suggest how dangerous non-fatal strangulation is as a predictor of homicide.
Key Data & Findings
From England & Wales:
- In the UK, there were 23,817 police reports of strangulation & suffocation in the first year when that became a standalone offence, and 39,360 in the second year. ifas.org.uk+1
- In the period 2011-2021, there were 342 strangulation homicides in England & Wales. Yorkshire Bylines+1
- The Femicide Census shows that of the 2,000 women killed in the UK since 2014, strangulation was used in 550(27%) of those killings. Of those, 372 were strangled by an intimate partner. ifas.org.uk+1
- Also important: among those killed by strangulation, ≈ 59% had experienced non-fatal strangulation before their death. ifas.org.uk
From the United States:
- According to a U.S. report (CDC NVDRS data), in intimate partner violence–related homicides, 5.9% of deaths were by hanging/strangulation/suffocation. CDC
- Females were more likely than males to die by those methods in IPV homicides (8.2% of female IPV homicides vs ~2.1% of male IPV homicides). CDC
Interpretation: Risk of Fatality from Non-Fatal Strangulation
Putting these together, some patterns emerge:
- Non-fatal strangulation is a major warning sign. Many people who are eventually killed by a partner have experienced non-fatal strangulation beforehand. (Example: 59% in one UK dataset.) ifas.org.uk
- But most reported non-fatal strangulation cases do not immediately end in homicide. The number of people reporting non-fatal strangulation is much larger than the number of strangulation homicides. For instance, 30-40 thousand reports vs a few hundred homicides in the same region/time period in the UK. ifas.org.uk+2ifas.org.uk+2
So while non-fatal strangulation is highly dangerous and strongly predictive of risk, it by no means always leads to death.
Rough Estimate
If I had to give a rough, ballpark figure based on the UK data:
- Suppose in one year there were ~30,000 non-fatal strangulation/suffocation reports. ifas.org.uk+1
- And strangulation homicides are on the order of perhaps dozens per year in a region (say ~30-40 in England & Wales for intimate partner or domestic homicides involving strangulation). If you compare these, the fatality rate among all reported non-fatal strangulations might be well under 1% (maybe in the order of 0.1-0.5%) in a given year.
