Sexual Offences - Recent V Historical - The Breakdown

Breakdown between recent and historical reporting of rape and sexual assault

The number of rapes and sexual assaults being reported by victims to gardaí within a week of the attack has increased steadily in the past five years.

Figures obtained by The Times show the number of such recorded crimes has risen from 742 in 2012 to 1,021 last year – an increase of 38 per cent.

The proportion of recent sexual offences (within 7 days) of the total number of rapes and sexual assaults being reported is also rising – from 35 per cent of all such crimes in 2012 to 40 per cent in 2016.

The figures also reveal that almost half of all victims of rapes and sexual assaults wait at least 12 months before contacting gardaí.

Over 44 per cent of all sexual offences recorded in the last five years relate to crimes which occurred over a year earlier.

In some cases, the crimes can go back decades as adults report incidents which occurred when they were children.

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More than a quarter of all cases related to incidents of historical abuse where sexual abuse took place over 10 years before being reported.

An analysis of almost 11,000 reports of sexual offences made to An Garda Síochána between 2012 and 2016 show just over 4,700 crimes occurred at least 12 months before they were reported, of which 2,769 had been committed at least a decade earlier.

It is the first time figures have been released which indicate the breakdown of sexual crime in Ireland between recent and historic offences based on Garda records.

Rape Crisis Network Ireland chief executive, Cliona Saidlear, said such figures provided insight into potential trends of how sexual crimes were being reported in Ireland.

“It’s always difficult to interpret or to explain an increase or decrease in the reporting of sexual offences but my instinct tells me the recent increase is the result of more victims prepared to go to the authorities rather than an increase in the overall number of rapes and sexual assaults being committed,” Ms Saidlear said.

She added: “I believe the figures are indicative of a changing landscape where a better climate and support system now exists to make it easier for people to come forward to tell what happened to them,”

Ms Saidlear also expressed surprise that the level of historic cases of sexual abuse – those taking over 10 years to be reported – had remained relatively constant in recent years.

Around 550 cases of sexual abuse dating back over a decade have been reported each year since 2012.

The number of historic cases peaked in 2010 at around 800 which was linked to the publication in November 2009 of the Murphy Report which examined clerical sex abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin.

“There was an expectation that the number of historical cases might have declined given that several reports have highlighted institutional abuse in the past,” said Ms Saidlear.

A sexual offence is not counted by the CSO or gardaí if a person who makes a report subsequently withdraws it by stating that a criminal act did not take place unless there is evidence to suggest “by reasonable probability” that it had taken place.

Sexual offence figures are based on the date they are reported to, or when they became known to gardaí, and not the date of the crime.

Crime figures released by the CSO last months highlighted how the number of rapes and sexual assaults reported to gardaí reached their highest level in the past decade and a half  in 2016.

A total of 2,549 sexual offences were recorded in 2016 – an annual increase of almost 9 per cent. It is almost double the level reported in 2007.

Organisations working with victims of sexual offences claim the true level of such crimes is difficult to estimate as it is widely believed many incidents of rape and sexual assault go unreported.

The highest number of sexual offences recorded in the past 15 years were reported last year in several Garda divisions – Dublin, Kildare, Laois/Offaly, Mayo and Cork West.

More than half of all cases in Dublin, Cork and Westmeath reported in 2016 related to incidents of sexual violence which had occurred in the previous month.

In contrast, two thirds of all cases reported in the Roscommon/Longford division related to crimes which had occurred at least one year earlier.