STATISTICS should always be accompanied by a health warning, particularly when they pertain to crime.

There’s no denying, however, that the fact that almost 60,000 domestic abuse cases were recorded by police in Scotland last year – more than 1,000 every week – is shocking. Indeed, Justice Secretary Michael Matheson is right to call the statistics “unacceptable”.

But look beneath the stark headline figures, which remain similar to the previous five years, and there are some positive signs, especially around the reporting of abuse and the response to it.

The longer term picture suggests not only that more incidents are being flagged to police in the first place, but that officers are responding better. Only around half of the incidents in these statistics formally became crimes, for a variety of reasons, but it is worth noting that a record that remains on file can be useful for officers seeking to build up a picture of abuse over time.

And although 80 per cent of the recorded incidents had a female victim, the fact that this is down 5 per cent over the last decade suggests men are also more willing to report abuse, whether their partner is male or female.

For far too long, domestic abuse was a hidden crime; the reporting and recording of violence and intimidation is an important step towards stopping and punishing the perpetrators.