You asked

Please provide the following;

How many sexual offences were recorded in each year (financial year, as specified above)?

Could I have a percentage breakdown of the ethnicities of the victims? (i.e. 60% of all sexual offences were committed against white British women, 13% Afro-Caribbean, etc.)

What are the conviction rates for each ethnicity? (i.e. 25% of sexual offences against white British convicted, 20% for white European etc)

For each question I am seeking information for each of the following time periods (financial years):

2014/15
2015/16
2016/17
2017/18 to date (most recent data available)

We said

Thank you for your enquiry in relation to the ethnicity of victims of sexual offences.

The numbers of sexual offences reported to and recorded by the police in each of the last four financial years are available in appendix Table A4 of our ‘Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2018’ publication, available here:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/crimeinenglandandwalesappendixtables.

Caution should be exercised in analysing the trend in the number of sexual offences recorded by the police during this period. The ‘Crime-recording: making the victim count’ report, published by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) in November 2014 indicated that sexual offences were being considerably under-recorded by the police;

https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmicfrs/publications/crime-recording-making-the-victim-count

Since then, there has been evidence of improvements in the recording of sexual offences by police forces. This has been coupled with an increased willingness of victims to come forward and report these crimes to the police, following high-profile coverage of sexual offences and the police response to reports of non-recent sexual offending. As such, it is likely that the increases seen in sexual offences are largely due to more victims reporting to the police and improvements in recording practices by police forces, rather than a genuine rise in these offences.

While we do hold data on the numbers of sexual offences reported to and recorded by the police in England and Wales (that are provided to us by the Home Office), we do not hold data related to the ethnicity of either the victims of these offences or the sentencing outcomes for these offences.

Data on police recorded crime (including sexual offences) in England and Wales are collated by the Home Office; they may be able to provide the ethnicity of victims data you require and can be contacted via: crimeandpolicestats@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk.

Data on sentencing (including convictions) in England and Wales are held and published by the Ministry of Justice; they may be able to help you further and can be contacted via: statistics.enquiries@justice.gsi.gov.uk.

An alternative source of information, that you may find useful, is the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). Although this doesn’t provide numbers of incidents of sexual offences, it can provide data on the risk of victimisation for sexual assaults. If you have any questions about this source, please simply email crimestatistics@ons.gov.uk and we will endeavour to help.