FOI reference: FOI-2026-3586
You asked
I would like the information on sexual offences, rape, assault, etc with a breakdown of ethnicity up to end of 2025.
Difficult to find this information, why?
We said
Thank you for your request.
The two main sources that we use to produce information on sexual offences, including rape and sexual assault are:
the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), which is a household victimisation survey and includes crimes that were and were not reported to the police; and
police recorded crime, which covers offences reported to and recorded by police forces in England and Wales and is supplied to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) by the Home Office.
We publish estimates of sexual assault victimisation by ethnicity in our sexual offences prevalence and victim characteristics dataset. The latest data (year ending March 2025) include breakdowns of sexual assault by personal characteristics, including ethnicity. Tables 4a, 4b and 4c provide data from year ending March 2023 to year ending March 2025, split by sex.
We have previously published estimates of the prevalence of people aged 16 to 74 who were victims of rape or assault by penetration in the last year by ethnicity. You can find these in Table 5 of our data for the year ending March 2020. We do not hold analysis showing this level of detail for the year ending March 2025, as our sample sizes are too small to create reliable estimates when splitting rape or assault by penetration by ethnicity. However, overall sexual assault estimates by ethnicity are still available.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) are primarily responsible for data on offenders. The quarterly criminal justice statistics contain an outcomes by offence data tool which allows you to filter by offence type and individual characteristics, including ethnicity.
If you require further data on this subject, it may be useful for you to contact them directly at CJS_Statistics@justice.gov.uk.