The headline figure used by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to show the number of crimes taking place has excluded sexual assault, which affects women more often than men. Not every incident is reported to the police, so to accurately estimate the number of crimes, the ONS surveys 30,000 randomly selected people in England and Wales each year. However, sexual assault, including rape, is challenging to measure as victims may be unwilling to respond if their abuser is present or if family members are unaware of the abuse, the ONS said, adding that it can also be hard to determine what counts as one crime of stalking or harassment.
According to the ONS, it must collect data on some crimes differently. But critics note that these exclusions conceal the extent of violence against women in the UK. However, separate analyses of sexual assault, domestic abuse, stalking, and harassment are published, crimes which occur more often to women than men. These crimes, however, are left out of the headline measure. Violent crime statistics don’t provide a true picture of trends in sexual assault because such incidents are classified as sexual offences and counted separately.
Sexual assault is on the rise, affecting just over 4% of women aged 16 to 59 in the year to March 2023, a number that has almost doubled since 2014. The rise is particularly driven by an increase in unwanted sexual touching, but rape and attempted rape are growing too. Stalking has also risen since 2015, identified by just under 6% of women. However, domestic abuse affected 6.5% of women, compared to 11% in 2005.
Harriet Wistrich, of the Centre for Women’s Justice, underscored that relying on a definition of “crime” or “violence” that excludes what many women experience and worry about “gives a distorted picture of how much safer ‘the general public’ are.” She added that “women are ‘the general public.’ But their experience of violence differs from men’s.” Meanwhile, Labour’s Dame Diana Johnson, who chairs the Home Affairs Select Committee, said that not being clear about whether dropping crime data included or excluded “key forms of violence against women undermines efforts to combat it.
Read the full article from The BBC here: Read More