Reference: FOI-2024-1885
You asked
Please send me rape statistics by ethnicity.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Our most recent statistics on sexual assault can be found in the year ending March 2022 edition of our Sexual offences prevalence and victim characteristics, England and Wales tables. Table 4 of this dataset provides information on victim characteristics, including ethnicity. However, data is 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.
You may therefore find our year ending March 2020 edition of our Sexual offences prevalence and victim characteristics, England and Wales tables useful. Specifically, 'Table 5: Percentage of adults aged 16 to 74 who were victims of sexual assault in the last year, by personal characteristics and sex, year ending March 2018 to year ending March 2020 CSEW combined' provides detailed information on rape victim characteristics including ethnicity.
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.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) are primarily responsible for data on convictions. You might find their Outcomes by offence data tool useful as this allows you to filter on crime type and by individual characteristics.
If you require further data on this subject, it may be useful for you to contact them directly at statistics.enquiries@justice.gov.uk.
In case it is of interest, population statistics on ethnicity in England and Wales can be found in the following publication: Ethnic group, England and Wales: Census 2021.
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.