Sun article about 550% ‘surge’ in grooming cases based on non-comparable data

An article published on the Sun website on 11 January, headlined “SHOCK CRIME SURGE Child grooming scandal deepens as cases rocket by nearly 550% in just eight years”, has been deleted after Full Fact made contact with the paper to explain that it was not a like-for-like comparison.

The article compared 1,157 cases of sexual grooming recorded by police in England and Wales in 2016 with 7,479 cases recorded in the year ending June 2024, and described this as a 546% rise in eight years.

These figures do appear in the police recorded crime data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), although the 2016 figure is 1,156 and covers the year ending in March 2017.

However, these figures don’t reliably tell us about the incidence of grooming over this period. A note on the data explains that the offences included under the classification of sexual grooming changed significantly in April 2017, after “sexual communication with a child” became an offence.

As the note says: “Prior to 1st April 2017 the Sexual Grooming classification was restricted to those offences where the offender intentionally met the child or either the victim or the suspect travelled with the intention of meeting. From 1st April 2017, it also includes the criminal offence of anyone aged 18 or over intentionally communicating with a child under 16, where the person acts for a sexual purpose and the communication is sexual or intended to elicit a sexual response."

In other words, the 7,479 figure in 2024 includes cases where the suspect only communicated with the victim, whereas the 1,156 figure up to March 2017 does not. The ONS confirmed with us that these figures are not comparable.

The change to the law introduced by the government in April 2017 made it an offence for anyone aged 18 or over to intentionally communicate with a child under 16, where the person is acting for a sexual purpose and the communication is sexual or intended to elicit a sexual response. There were already other offences available to deal with sexual communication, however, so it’s possible that some cases which are counted as sexual grooming in the statistics after 2017 would previously have been recorded in a different category.

Full Fact approached the Sun for comment.

This claim was found with the help of Full Fact’s AI tools.

What does the data show?

Recorded grooming cases have been rising in recent years, but there was a notable increase shortly after the offence classification changed.

Recorded cases of many other child sexual offences have also risen substantially since the mid-2010s.

However, in a bulletin about offences with adult victims, the ONS says that police-recorded sexual offences “do not provide a reliable measure of trends”, as “improvements in police recording practices and increased reporting by victims have contributed to increases in recent years”.

Therefore, increases seen in police-recorded data don’t necessarily show “how grooming has grown in the past two decades”, as the Sun also claimed.

As the ONS has also said: “The impact of high-profile incidents, media coverage, and campaigns on people's willingness to report both recent and historical incidents to the police are likely to result in annual variations in the number of offences recorded by the police.”