Historically sexual offences in the US, the UK, Australia, and elsewhere have been both under reported and under investigated.
There's a potentially misleading graphic mid article: The proportion of violent and sexual offences solved has almost halved since 2017 that shows a change in "percentage of cases with an outcome" from 20% to a bit over 10%.
It's probable (but not clarified) that a good part of that percentage change is due to an increase in reporting of sexual offences.
It should go without saying that this is a sorry state of affairs, it should also be emphasized that this isn't neccessarily evidence of a sudden and sharp decline in the already low rate of convictions.
As information continues to come to light is it actually concievable that the government is actively avoiding investigations that might put the government's immigration policies into question? That seems to be the unstated in the article.
Has the case load dramatically increased, as in were there many more offenses? Were resources cut or reallocated? Did the definition of what counts as a sexual offense or reporting calculations change somehow? The article just doesn't say, which is absurdly bad journalism.
I strongly suspect that it's harder to find suspects to charge who have fewer local links and less documentation. I also suspect the CPS is probably failing to bring cases in a level and fair way, why bother when the judge will let them off without jail time because of 'cultural differences'? [0][1]. We know that migrants are 350% more likely to be arrested for sexual crimes than British citizens [2], but that's only some of the picture and the government wont release full figures.
The same government which has declared "Asian grooming gangs" to be a 'racist' term for gangs of Pakistani immigrants who committed hundreds of sex crimes against young girls? It's certainly a possibility.
Please would you take a moment to consider why people might be so quick to blame this on immigrants and why it might be unhelpful to repeat that claim? Noting the facts given in that Times piece don't support it.
because stats, raw numbers are raw numbers and an non-eu imigrant is 5x more likely to commit a serious crime.
And lets not open whole muslim can of worms where crime vs infidels are not seen as crimes and even if seen as crime its illegal for muslim to side with infidel side.
Reading the article linked, then consulting the internet for the most unsolved crimes area, the people in the area are overwhelmingly white and born in the UK. 83% white and 84% born in the UK.
The police have been for decades failing to bring cases against none white perpetrators to the same degree as they have with white perpetrators for the fear of looking racist. That's what the controversy is about.
There literally was a national-level inquiry investigated when the Tories were in power and a set of recommendations were put forth as a result of that inquiry. The current Labour govt is actively implementing those recommendations. If there's one thing that's bipartisan, it's this.
There are a variety of factors at play behind the rise in reports, including high profile cases such as the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer, in addition to massive coverage of historic sexual abuse by public figures like Jimmy Savile. There have been multiple high profile campaigns for women’s safety encouraging them to come forward and report cases of sexualised violence.
So despite the police force certainly allocating more resources to deal with these cases, the increase outstrips this. In addition, sexualised violence is notoriously difficult to prosecute beyond a reasonable doubt due to the ‘he said she said’ nature of a lot of the evidence and the delay in many of the victims coming forward.
Your point about immigration has a simple answer; it’s not a factor. This talking point serves to take very real social problems the country faces and use them to score political points by distorting the facts.
Case in point the grooming gangs scandal which was painted as a Pakistani muslim problem when it turns out Asians are UNDERrepresented and whites are actually OVERrepresented in the actual figures (88% of offences were committed by whites with them making up 83% of the population, south asians committed 7% of offences while making up 9% of the population)
Why might certain groups be underrepresented or over-represented in the figures? Perhaps it's because for decades certain groups have not been properly prosecuted, eg the whole point of the controversy around grooming gangs.
My political agenda? Its an article from your country that implied it and I called it out for being bad. If you think my comment is pushing that agenda you have poor reading skills, it was very clearly strongly the opposite.
It’s not bad journalism, it’s modern journalism! It reports data and invites readers like you to confirm your preconceived biases with it, such that it never challenges those beliefs and risks losing you as a reader, nor risks confirming your beliefs and losing other readers. It’s win win all around!
There are four things that, if fully funded, would lead to crime rates plummeting. They are welfare, mental health, housing and drug rehabilitation. We know this based on numerous examples around the world, particularly some European countries.
The alternative is to spend even more money on police funding, who aren't really that effective at stopping crime and who directly cause their own negative social issues. Prisons are extremely expensive to run per inmate.
The crime problem is much easier to deal with if the crimes do not happen in the first place.
> Nearly 1.9m violent or sexual crimes in England and Wales were closed without a suspect being caught or charged in the year to June 2024 – about 89% of all offences given an outcome, official figures show.
So, not just sexual offenses and not just England.
The article conflates solved and charged to in a way that suggests there’s some unsolved mystery. My guess is that many of these are uncharged because there is insufficient evidence to prove guilt.
What we definitely haven't been lacking in the past ten years at least is high emphasis on the importance of prosecuting sexual harassment and violence, especially in countries such as the UK. I think this excludes an underestimation of the importance of these crimes.
And since the amount of resources dedicated to solving each case is proportional to its gravity, the fact that almost 90% of these crimes are unsolved probably means that most of them are minor and/ or lacking principal suspects, witnesses or evidence.
For anyone who wishes to understand a little bit more about what it can actually be like to bring offences like this to justice, I'd recommend Australian author and former Judge's Associate Bri Lee's memoir 'Eggshell Skull'. Obviously it's about her experiences in Australia. It also differs a little from the offences referenced in this article because her complaint was in relation to a childhood incident.
The reason I think its insights are relevant despite some major differences of context compared to this article is that the general barriers she faced at every step of the way trying to get some justice (despite being a Judge's Associate and the daughter of a well known and respected police officer) speak to the broad realities of navigating justice systems when you've been assaulted.
A total lack of understanding of these processes leads to people saying things like 'well there probably wasn't enough evidence' or 'the cops probably needed their finite resources for something bigger/worse' like they're unimpeachable axioms that exist in a vacuum.
The lack of critical thinking (or curiosity, or empathy?) about the (many, broad) realities of reporting crimes, or dealing with cops and the justice system if you're one of the few that make it far enough in the systems is just so frustrating to me. The thought terminating cliches that rely on the assumption that there's a just and relatively simple explanation for these stats get my goat.
In Eggshell Skull, Lee describes how many times she had to actually contact police in order to get them to even start a file, let alone getting them to actually take a report.
From first (and second) hand experience, the cops just turning people away (and lying about 'someone will be in touch') also applies to victims showing up at a police station immediately after an assault, clothes torn, not yet covered in the soon to bloom bruises. They don't even direct people to attend crisis centres or the hospital who will actually collect evidence following an assault. A friend of mine has described how the police (in a major metropolitan city) literally laughed and said 'men can't be sexually assaulted' when he brought in a male friend immediately after it had happened. They were then threatened with arrest by the cop when they asked to see someone at the station other than this front desk cop because they wanted to make a report. Arresting them would not be justifiable, but the intent of the threat, however empty, is pretty clear. Also good effing luck getting justice if the arrest threat was actually followed through. The cops are an active barrier to timely collection of evidence and a report. What is someone who keeps pushing for opening a case then left with? Little or no physical evidence and a report made maybe weeks after the event. It doesn't exactly set up a case all that well. Oh, I guess the cops aren't going to resource this case when that's all they've got to go on. The amount and quality of evidence and witnesses and whatnot doesn't seem to make a difference for these things but I've got no experience with that.
I guess I just wish people understood a little bit more about how things can work IRL and that it's not clear and simple. I know random internet anecdotes are worthless (especially the second hand ones) but maybe consider that things don't necessarily work the ways you think they do.
I'm also skirting around one of the more pertinent questions when crime stats like this pop up. What is the actual function of police? It's evident that it's not to solve crimes. That's maybe a discussion for another time.
I don’t know, I tried to find stats but couldn’t. Harassment can be phone calls, emails, text messages etc. which can be very hard to track down and numerous so they clog up systems.
I don't see a definition or threshold there other than a tautology. Can you quote one into this thread?
And it does seem a reasonable assumption that "harassment" would outnumber the other crimes mentioned. A brief glance at other sources suggests a ratio between 3× and 10×, which is enough to drown out the headline-bait crimes, regardless of whether GP is wrong about the definition.
> it does seem a reasonable assumption that "harassment" would outnumber the other crimes mentioned.
No it doesn't. The incident rates and under-reporting rates are all different.
Further: t's not the responsibility of the person you replied to, to provide evidence negating the original claim, which is completely unsupported and comes from someone who clearly has at best poor education on the subject and at worst is intentionally misrepresenting standards for what will be considered enough to take a report, much less investigate and attempt to prosecute.
OP puts up a straw man that criminal harassment is any trivial slight in the eye of the alleged victim. However, for an instance of harassment to be criminal harassment, the perpetrator must [1(b)] know their behaviour is harassment. Morever, if perpetrator is behaving reasonably, then it's not harassment [3(c)].
Section 7 is also key to statutory interpretation. 7(b) gives persuasive examples (you had not seen these and so called section 1 tautological). Morever, 7(3) means that the criminal offence only applies to repeat offenders.
I see your 7(3) reference, but 7(b) does not exist, and none of the 7(###)(b) seems to give examples of any kind?
7(2) seems very broad though, from a layman's reading:
> References to harassing a person include alarming the person or causing the person distress.
and this alone is probably enough to cause at least some fraction of the reports to not actually meet the threshold for a conviction. So I don't see enough to prove the ancestor post "misinformation".
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Still, the actual definition is orthogonal to my point (as opposed to whatever else the top-level poster tried to make a point of), which is that statistics are still skewed to the point of uselessness by the fact that "harassment" appears to be the overwhelming majority by whatever definition is being used.
If you want to make a reasonable statistical claim about assault of either kind, this source is useless.
I'm downvoting because you're dredging up the same old tiresome over-reporting / overzealous prosecution claims with no evidence (when there is in fact extensive evidence these sorts of crimes are under-reported.)
Also because you ignored "grievous bodily harm, sexual assault, stalking, rape" to cherry pick harassment.
Also because you claim without evidence that harassment, and a very weak form of harassment, are a significant percentage of cases.
Then you leveraged the fact that most people probably do not understand the legal definitions (and statutory thresholds.)
Then you invented a definition of harassment to suit your argument and the notion that women are trying to report, and police are taking reports of, "someone staring at them on the train."
The legal definition of harassment is what matters:
I didn’t. I specifically put stalking and harassment in a separate group because I believe their inclusion with the other serious crimes makes the stats look so dismal. I did try to find the breakdown of which types of crimes remained unsolved and couldn’t find anything.
From your link harassment can be the following
phone calls
letters
emails
visits
All of those seem highly subjective and are specifically relevant to my comment because they can be numerous and are very hard to track down thus leading to low solve rates.
There's a potentially misleading graphic mid article: The proportion of violent and sexual offences solved has almost halved since 2017 that shows a change in "percentage of cases with an outcome" from 20% to a bit over 10%.
It's probable (but not clarified) that a good part of that percentage change is due to an increase in reporting of sexual offences.
It should go without saying that this is a sorry state of affairs, it should also be emphasized that this isn't neccessarily evidence of a sudden and sharp decline in the already low rate of convictions.