Authored by Clive Pinder: Britain is now the sort of country where you can get an instant answer to ‘What is the carbon footprint of a sausage roll?’. Yet if you ask, ‘Are we importing risk to women along with importing people?’ our nation state stares at its shoes and starts muttering about ‘complexity’.
Let us begin with two official lines that any half-awake citizen can see are rising at the same time.
Line one, sexual violence.
The ONS crime bulletin for the year ending June 2025 reports 211,225 sexual offences recorded by the police in England and Wales are up 9% from the previous year. It also reports 72,804 rape offences, up 6% year on year, with rape making up around 34% of all recorded sexual offences.
The ONS, to be fair, sticks in a big asterisk. Part of the rise is not a sudden outbreak of more predators. It is a change in the bookkeeping. That means some of what now shows up as an ‘increase’ is simply behaviour that was previously recorded differently, or not cleanly separated at all, now being captured under a new label. In short, not every uptick is more men doing worse things in dark alleys.
Fine. Caveat accepted. The numbers are still brutal.
