Luxembourg logs record 1,297 domestic-violence police call-outs in 2025

Police in Luxembourg intervened in 1,297 domestic-violence cases in 2025, the highest tally in a decade and a 10.1% increase on the year before, according to the annual report of the inter-professional committee that coordinates the Grand Duchy's response to such violence.

The figures, presented in late June 2026 by Yuriko Backes, the minister for gender equality and diversity, work out to an average of 108 police call-outs a month — more than three a day — in a country of about 680,000 people. Police logged 1,178 interventions in 2024 and 1,057 in 2023, making 2025 the busiest year on record for the past decade.

More than three call-outs a day

The report pools data from the public prosecutors' offices in Luxembourg City and Diekirch, the Grand Ducal Police, the victim-support services SAVVD, PSYea and ALTERNATIVES, and Riicht Eraus, the service that works with perpetrators. It counted 2,802 people as victims of violence in their own homes during 2025 — women in roughly eight cases out of ten, and children in close to three in ten. About 80% of the incidents occurred within a couple, and the police identified 2,075 presumed perpetrators, 63.5% of them men.

Officials are wary of reading the rise purely as more violence. Much of it, they say, reflects a greater willingness to report and a public more alert to warning signs.

"We are seeing it: more and more people in the surroundings — neighbours, friends, relatives — are reporting potential acts of violence to us," Kristin Schmit, central director of the judicial police, told the daily Le Quotidien.

Evictions approaching one a day

In 334 cases, prosecutors ordered the alleged perpetrator removed from the family home — 47 more than in 2024 and a 16% increase, or an average of 28 evictions a month, close to one a day. Under Luxembourg law, the police can remove a violent partner from a shared home for an initial 14 days on the prosecutor's order, a measure intended to give victims breathing space without forcing them to flee. The report said those orders were extended a further 130 times in 2025.

The pattern of who is removed and who is protected was consistent across the data:

• 87.7% of those evicted were men;
• 81.6% of the victims shielded by an eviction order were women;
• roughly one in five evictions involved a repeat perpetrator.

A system under strain

Behind the headline numbers, the report flagged pressure points. Of the perpetrators evicted in 2025, 21.5% were repeat offenders, and 55.6% of those repeat offenders failed to attend the mandatory appointments with Riicht Eraus meant to address their behaviour — a gap the ministry concedes weakens the system's ability to break cycles of violence. Backes said the government had commissioned a study to map the profiles of recidivist offenders and benchmark Luxembourg's response against other countries, with operational recommendations expected later in 2026.

Capacity is also tight at the other end of the system. Support services reported a waiting list of roughly 50 to 60 women, often with their children, seeking places in shelters — a backlog advocates have repeatedly warned can leave victims exposed at the most dangerous moment, when they try to leave. The newly created National Centre for Victims of Violence (CNVV) took in several hundred people in its first year of operation.

What the ministry says

Backes framed the figures as a problem the country is confronting more openly rather than one it has solved, and signalled that the trend in interventions and evictions was not yet moving in the right direction.

"In the fight against domestic violence, we continue to rely on a multidimensional approach combining victim protection, support for perpetrators of violence and awareness-raising," the minister said as she presented the report.

The government has folded the work into a National Action Plan on gender-based violence spanning dozens of projects across ministries, and Backes told a parliamentary committee that her ministry's budget had grown by about a quarter since 2024, with most of the increase directed at prevention. On the question of recidivism, she was blunt about the aim of the new research: "We want to understand where the problems are and what we can improve in future in how repeat perpetrators of violence are supervised," she said.

For now, the report leaves Luxembourg with a stark accounting metric: more than three police interventions a day, and nearly one perpetrator a day ordered out of a home, in one of Europe's wealthiest and smallest states.