ABSTRACT
In the grand sweep of crime, sex offences are officially not as common as many other offences. The UK Home Office recorded 54,982 sex offences for 2010-11 – this amounts to around just 5 per cent of all violent crime. However, these crimes continue to provoke a great deal of anxiety and concern. For reasons discussed in Chapter 3, being precise about criminal statistics is very difficult but figures for serious sexual offences including both female and male rape have been increasing over the last decade despite the fact that these cases remain severely under-reported. There is always a large hidden figure of crime, but in the case of sex offences such problems may be magnified because many victims do not wish to report the crimes at all – finding the glare of public recognition and scrutiny too traumatic. In some cases – often involving underage offences – victims may not be aware that a crime has been committed. Even when a crime
is reported, getting a conviction may be difficult; according to the Fawcett Society, a UK women’s rights organization, only 1 in 20 rapes reported to the police leads to a conviction. In their recent study Lovett and Kelly (2009) also found that attrition rates in England and Wales were very low and that there was: ‘[A] virtually continuous year-on-year rise in reporting and only a nominal increase in prosecutions and convictions, with the effect of an ever-decreasing conviction rate’ (2009: 45; also see Figure 11.1).
