More than 1,000 women suffered a sexual assault every day last year – but only one in 88 rape claims resulted in a conviction, a report said yesterday.
One in five women has been a victim of sexual assault since the age of 16, with almost half a million adult females in England and Wales preyed upon every year, the study revealed.While most of the 400,000 female victims were subject to unwanted touching and indecent exposure, one in every 200 women was a victim of rape or another serious sexual assault.More than 1,000 women suffered a sexual assault every day last year – but only one in 88 rape claims resulted in a conviction, a report said yesterday.
One in five women has been a victim of sexual assault since the age of 16, with almost half a million adult females in England and Wales preyed upon every year, the study revealed.While most of the 400,000 female victims were subject to unwanted touching and indecent exposure, one in every 200 women was a victim of rape or another serious sexual assault.In the last three years court statistics reveal an average of just 5,620 offenders are convicted each year for all types of sexual offences.A total of 1,070 criminals were convicted for rape, according to the first joint overview of sexual offending in England and Wales as reported by the Guardian.
The report comes after Baroness Stern voiced her concerns over government ministers misleading the public about low rape conviction figures, which she said left victims feeling neglected and stopped women coming forward.Lady Stern, a prison reform campaigner and human rights activist, called in her 2010 report for ‘an end to the widespread use of misleading rape conviction data – in particular the six per cent conviction rate figure’.
The new figures show 62.5 per cent of rape cases ended in a conviction in 2011, eight per cent higher than in 2005 where 800 were convicted.More rapists are also being jailed for increasingly long sentences.Yet rape crime remains under-reported to the police compared with other crimes, with only 15 per cent of women saying they had reported the offence to the police.Martin Hewitt of the Association of Chief Police Officers told the Guardian that police had been working to encourage victims to report sex crimes. – DailyMail
