The problem with calculating the number of child sex offences

Last week we factchecked the claim that in 2010/11 there were 23,097 victims of child sex offences in England and Wales, or as the papers put it, one 'attack' every 20 minutes.

Since then one of our readers has dome some digging to shed some more light on the figures, covered on the Ministry of Truth website.

This points out that while the media largely reported the figures as 'child sex attacks', the range of offences listed was much broader than this might suggest, and that the NSPCC's research may not have accounted for distinctions in the law between what constitutes a 'child'.

The Sexual Offences Act 2003 legal guidence states that the age of consent is 16 and that any sexual activity involving children under 16 is against the law. However the law also classes 16-18 year olds as children when it comes to other offences, involving pornography, prostitution or abuse of trust.

The NSPCC itself noted that "the majority of offences, 14,819, were reported against 11-17-year-olds." So what do these age distinctions tell us about the nature of the crimes captured by the NSPCC's FoI requests?

The Ministry of Justice statistics (shown in the table below) have three different categories for offences against children broken down by age: offences against those under 13, offences against those under 16 and offences against those under 18.

However it is also important to remember that a child can themselves be convicted of a child sex offence. Under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 a defendant is classed as a child if they are under 18, and is more likely to be given a lighter sentence than an adult as a result.

Under Section 13 of the Act a child (under 18) can be convicted of sexual activity with a child (under 16). Potentially, therefore, the NSPCC figures could include incidents of sexual relations between similarly-aged partners either side of their sixteenth birthdays. These aren't necessarily the sort of offences typically classed as 'sex attacks'.

Statistics on child sex offences usually do not report the age of the perpetrator which means that within the statistics presented below there are an unknown number of child sex offences committed by children.

Bearing in mind these issues, we can from the MoJ figures estimate the number of child sex offences. In the table below those offences which affect children only are highlighted in red.

If we add all of these together then in 2010/11 there were 17,873 child sex offences. This is different to the number produced in the NSPCC press release last week of 23,097. So how can we account for this?

Firstly, we don't know the details of the NSPCC's FoI requests, so we don't know if a distinction has been made between under 18s and children. As we've seen, when it comes to child sex offences the two aren't synomymous.

However the Ministry of Jusitce figures do have other categories of offences - including sexual assault on a male/female over 13 - which could also involve child victims (highlighted above in yellow). In total these number 18,520, although only a fraction may be relevant to child abuse.

Neither the NSPCC nor the official figures can therefore give us the full picture of child sex offences, which is known to be an area that suffers from under-reporting. While the NSPCC did not break down the information by type of offence or age of the victims, making it impossible to be sure that all the victims were children in the eyes of the law, the MoJ age breaks aren't specific enough to fill in the gaps.