FOI reference: FOI-2025-2715
You asked
Can I please have the data break down of sexual violence / rape in the UK by ethnicity for the last 10 years?
We said
Thank you for your request.
We publish data on sexual assault and rape using two main sources of data, the Crime Survey for England (CSEW) and Wales and police recorded crime.
The latest police recorded sexual assault and rape figures, for year ending March 2003 to year ending September 2024, can be found in the Crime in England and Wales Appendix tables, table A5a (rows 67-104). These data are not broken down by ethnicity.
We publish CSEW estimates for the proportion of people who were victims of sexual assault and rape in the previous 12 months. These are available for people aged 16 to 59 for the year ending March 2005 to year ending March 2024 in Table S43c of our Crime in England and Wales: Annual supplementary tables.
We hold the following CSEW estimates for sexual assault or rape data broken down by ethnicity.
Our most recent statistics from the CSEW for people aged over 16 who were victims of sexual assault in the last year by ethnicity can be found in Table 4 of the year ending March 2022 edition of our Sexual offences prevalence and victim characteristics, England and Wales tables. These data are not broken down by type of sexual assault. Furthermore, these tables are based on six months of data and caution should be taken due to the impact of reduced sample size and lower response rate.
Table 5 in our year ending March 2020 edition of our Sexual offences prevalence and victim characteristics, England and Wales tables presents the percentage of people aged 16 to 74 who were victims of sexual assault in the last year, by type of sexual assault and ethnicity. These data use combined data from the CSEW for the year ending March 2018 to year ending March 2020. Combined CSEW data for people aged 16 to 59 for the year ending March 2016 to year ending 2018 can be found in Table 7 of our Sexual offending: Crime Survey for England and Wales appendix tables.
Statistics from the year ending March 2017 CSEW relating to the ethnicity of victims of sexual assault by type of sexual assault aged 16 to 59 were published in Table 10 within the Sexual offences: appendix tables. Sexual assault tables for the year ending March 2016 and March 2015 were published alongside the Focus on violent crime and sexual offences publications in Table 4.10 of our Appendix Tables - focus on violent crime and sexual offences tables. Data for the year ending March 2014 can be found in Table 4.09 of 02. Appendix Tables - Focus on Violent Crime and Sexual Offences, 2013/14.
You may also be interested in our previous article Sexual offending: victimisation and the path through the criminal justice system and its accompanying dataset which contains statistics on rape by ethnicity for the year ending March 2018. The Sexual offending: Ministry of Justice (MOJ) appendix tables published alongside this release contain data on defendants and offenders of sexual offences. MOJ Table 3 provides data on the ethnicity of defendants by sexual offence group and MOJ Table 7 provides data on the ethnicity of offenders who were found guilty by sexual offence group.
If you have any queries about our crime publications, our Crime Statistics team can assist via CrimeStatistics@ons.gov.uk.
These statistics refer to England and Wales only. If you require data for Scotland, you'll need to contact them directly at Justice_Analysts@gov.scot. Similarly, if you require data for Northern Ireland, you'll need to contact them directly at statistics.research@justice-ni.x.gsi.gov.uk.