Marie Claire (and where else would I go for my news) reports
Shocking 37% rape increase in London
As the article later explains, all may not quite be what it seems. The 37% increase is in reports of rapes in London over the last 12 months.
Is that terrible, or is it a good news story? From that statistic alone we just don’t know. It could be that there have been 37% more rapes in London over that time – that would be a shocking increase over any period, even more so in just one year.
But it could equally be the case that the actual number of rapes is stable, or even falling, and it’s simply that more women are having the confidence to come forward and report rapes which, in previous years, would never have come to light. Alternatively, more reports may be being classed as rapes by the police.
If either are true, the 37% increase would be a good news story.
How can we tell which it is?
It’s difficult to be sure, but the best bet is to look at the British Crime Survey which, since the 1980s, has gone out and asked thousands of people about their personal experiences of crime each year.
The BCS isn’t perfect. In the past it hasn’t asked children (though that’s now changed). It also doesn’t ask about murder (for some reason, asking 40,000 random people “have you been murdered in the last 12 months” produces a result that consistently under-estimates the real murder rate). But it’s a lot better than reported crime figures if you want to know whether a crime is becoming more or less prevalent.
So what does the BCS have to say [pdf] about serious sexual offences?
The statisticians start by warning about the reported figures:
Over the last year, police forces have reported taking some additional steps to improve their recording of rape and other sexual offences. This may be reflected in the increases for recorded sexual offence figures that can be seen in 2009/10.
And what does the British Crime Survey itself tell us?
Table 3.15 is clear: the BCS surveys have found no signficant change in the number of rapes or attempted rapes since 2004: each year between two in every thousand (0.2%) and four in every thousand (0.4%) women reported being the victim of rape or attempted rape in the previous year (for 2009/10 it’s 0.3%, the same as the year before and the year before that).
That doesn’t settle the argument of course. The BCS isn’t perfect. It wouldn’t pick up a surge in rapes where the victims were under 16 or over 59. Given the small sample sizes, it probably wouldn’t pick up a localised increase either (an increase in rapes in London where the rest of the country had seen no change, for example).
But it’s strong evidence to help us answer the question: that 37% increase looks to be good news rather than bad, with more rapes being reported (or, more likely, more of those reported rapes being properly recorded) rather than a real increase in the crime.
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6 Comments
Either way I am not sure we could label this a “good news story”, but I obviously get your point. Let us hope that it is the latter explanation – that more women feel confident about reporting rape.
If the actual number of rapes hasn’t increased, but police are recording more reports of rapes and/or more women are coming forward who wouldn’t have done before, I would see that as a good news story.
The article in `Marie Clair’ that has prefaced the frightening but confusing statistic that rape reporting is up by 37% begs the question that the authorities must be better resourced and vigilant to offer a public safety protection of women on the public streets of the City,especially at night?
I make these comments:
1.The magazine has rightly drawn attention to its readers and their friends that new Teaching in schools, is aimed at making girls (and males) more aware of the dangers of Rape or sexual attack in the streets.But the salient question remains that we do not know if Rape being reported is on the increase as an assumption that reports are deemed to be on the increase by 37%?
2.I ask that in the run up to the London Mayoral Election in 2012 that all candidates,especially the L/D, all make a clear pledge to reopen the closed `Rape Crisis Centres’ under Mayor Johnson`s watch.The ability of victim women who have suffered at the hands of Rape or molester attackers should know that there are points of help from discreet professionals,giving advice and personal counselling.
3.The London Olympics 2012 and City should be a safe place where women are not subject to the degradation of human trafficking or that prostitution is seen to serve as a catalyst and allowed to proliferate, during the period of the spirit of the games.
From the link you provide:
“Due to sensitivity of reporting in the context of a face-to-face interview, the main BCS crime
count does not include rape and other sexual offences. However, the BCS does provide
estimates of the proportion of adults who have been victims of such offences obtained via a
separate self-completion module.”
I don’t know how many people do this self-completion module. If it’s 40,000 then the variation of reports that would give a rounded up or down 0.3% result would be 101 to 139 individuals. The incidence could be reported as staying at 0.3% when in fact incidence could have risen by up to 38% in the sample. The 0.3% BCS figures are a very insensitive tool for this purpose and cannot be used to argue that incidence is steady, and certainly not in London.
You make good points in this post Iain, but to cite the BCS as strong evidence of anything I think is pushing it a bit.
The numbers that the 0.3% figure came from were 11000-14000 responses each year.
I was raped twice before I was 16 and didn’t report it as I knew everyone, including my family, would blame me, say that I was lying etc. Since then, with the pornography view of rape as entertainment being predominant amongst young men and the media who also inform the majority of the police, juries and legal councel there is very little support for rape victims at all – a fact not unnoticed by girls and women. If you are a rape victim there is no Rape Crisis centre available throughout London due to no funding – and if you speak to anyone else about it they invariably look into the distance or change the subject, sure that you, like every other ‘victim’ of rape is one of the lying women the media is so fond of covering. The fact that only 3 – 9% of reported rapes are thought to be malicious, a figure in line with other malicious reporting of crime, is not covered, nor is the figure that Rape Crisis puts the figure of underreporting much closer to 9 in 10 rapes going unreported. The best way of keeping victims quiet is to accuse them of being liars – just like the Catholic Church did with children and men do with women that have been raped – these subjects don’t become hidden without a body of people doing the hiding.