FOI reference: FOI-2025-2820
You asked
I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act regarding statistics on ethnicity and sexual crimes committed in the UK over the last five years (from May 2020 to May 2025).
If possible, I would appreciate receiving a breakdown of the ethnicities of both victims and perpetrators.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
We publish statistics on crime primarily from two main sources:
- Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) – a household victimisation survey that asks respondents about their experiences of crime, regardless of whether the incident was reported to the police.
- Police recorded crime (from the Home Office) – offences that are reported to and/or recorded by police forces in England and Wales.
Data on trends in sexual offences from both data sources are collated in our most recent publication on Sexual offences in England and Wales overview: year ending March 2022. These data are published in our Sexual offences Prevalence and Victim Characteristics dataset.
Table 4 provides statistics for the prevalence of sexual assault in the last year among adults aged 16 years and over, by personal characteristics and sex, including a breakdown by ethnic group. We plan to publish CSEW data on sexual victimisation by ethnicity of victim for the year ending March 2025 later this year.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) are primarily responsible for data involving perpetrators of sexual crimes and publish criminal justice statistics for England and Wales on a quarterly basis which may be of use to you. Should you require further assistance, the MoJ can be contacted at the following email address: ESD@justice.gov.uk.
If you have any other crime-related queries, please email crimestatistics@ons.gov.uk and we will endeavour to help.