Sexual Offences

We live in a world in which 150 million girls under the age of 16 – representing 14 per cent of the world’s female population – are sexually abused each year. One in five girls and one in thirteen men will experience sex abuse during their childhood. In England and Wales there were a total of 68,657 recorded rapes of women in 2018/19 and 103,337 other sexual assaults. However, the Office for National Statistics itself states that ‘sexual offences recorded by the police are not a reliable measure of trends in this type of crime’. There are two reasons for this. First, it should also be noted that these statistics relate to people over 16, whereas 32 per cent of reported victims are under the age of 16. Second, most victims of sexual offences do not report the incident to the police. More than 83 per cent of victims of sexual crime do not report the incident to the police. In 2018/19 it is estimated that 3.7 per cent of women (560,000) and 0.9 per cent of men (140,000) aged 16–59 experienced sexual assault in the last year and that 20 per cent of women and 4 per cent of men have experienced some type of sexual assault since the age of 16.