Why rising police reports don't mean women are reporting rape more often
Australia's best data shows reporting rates are falling even as police record more sexual assaults. It seems I didn't explain this properly last time, so here's why those 2 things aren't contradictory
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the data that shows the number of men committing rape is increasing at the same time as their accountability through the legal system is decreasing.
Multiple people in comments and private messages told me that this is because the rate at which women report rape to police has increased. This, they claimed, is a good thing. It means all the awareness raising has worked and more men who commit rape are being dealt with through the justice system.
Me, in the second paragraph of the article:
“…while the number of rapes and sexual assaults reported to police is increasing, the rate at which people report rape and sexual assault to police is decreasing…” (emphasis in the original).
Frustrating as this is, I have always believed that the onus for communication is on the writer. If there’s a strong trend in readers misunderstanding something I’ve written, then I haven’t written it properly. So I’m here to explain it in more detail.
Data about violence typically comes from two sources: police reports and personal surveys. They both have strengths and weaknesses but they’re both only useful if the data is properly explained so everyone knows what it is and what it isn’t.
Police recorded crime data
People sometimes report to police after a crime has been committed and usually (but not always) police keep a record of that report. This data is collected from police forces around the country and collated to publish national Recorded Crime Victims data. This is where I get the data on reports to police.
To be very clear: even though the rate at which women report to police is going down, the overall number of rapes reported to police is going up. This means the increase in women being raped and sexually assaulted is so large that even though fewer of them are reporting to police, the number of sexual assaults has almost doubled in ten years.
Again, even though fewer women are reporting rape to police, the number of rapes reported has almost doubled because the underlying incidence has increased so dramatically.
This is not because more women are reporting rape and sexual assault to police. The best available data says the rate of reporting has more than halved since 2012. In 2012, 19% of women who said they had experienced sexual violence since age 15 reported it to police. By 2021–22, that had fallen to 8% (more details here).
This is not because of any change in definitions of rape and sexual assault. The ABS codes carefully against specific crimes and have been at some pains to keep it reliably consistent since 2014.
This is not to do with increased population because the victimisation rate (the number of reports per 100,000 people) has increased by 65% since 2010.
This is clearly about an actual increase – a significant one – in the number of men raping and sexually assaulting women and girls over the last ten to fifteen years.
Personal Survey Data
Organisations such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) conduct surveys with statistically representative sample groups and ask them about their experiences of violence. Participants can be required to provide basic demographic data, but they cannot (and should not) be compelled to answer questions about violence.
There are two such surveys conducted in Australia by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The main one is the Personal Safety Survey (PSS), which asks over 10,000 people dozens of detailed questions about specific behaviour that constitutes domestic and physical violence and one question about whether they have been subjected to sexual violence. This is the question:
“Has any (man/woman) including your current partner ever forced you, or tried to force you, into sexual activity against your will?”
If you are homeless or in hospital, or staying with friends or family, living in a domestic violence refuge, hotel, motel, hostel, short-stay caravan park or nursing home, you are excluded from this survey.
If you choose to not answer intrusive and traumatic questions from a stranger, you would be among the 48% of people who are asked to complete the full survey and decline.
If you answer “no” to the question about being forced into sexual activity against your will, you might be among the significant number of people who, as research shows, think “forced” means physical force, not coercion, intimidation, powerlessness or being incapacitated. You might also be among the unknowable number of people who cannot or will not answer “yes” to that question because it’s too painful, too frightening, too difficult, too much.
If you can answer “yes” to that question, you would be included in the estimated the 22% of Australian women who are a statistically representative sample of the people who were asked this question and were willing and able to answer “yes”.
Women who were able to answer yes to that question were also asked if they reported the rape or sexual assault to police, which is where we get the estimates on reporting rates (19% in 2012 and 8% in 2021-22).
I’ve been very clear about how and why I think the PSS underestimates violence, but this is not a failing of research or methodology. The failing is in the explanation of the data. It’s so often repeated that people who should know better (and even people who do know better) will still repeat the claim that “one in 5 women (22%) has experienced sexual violence since the age of 15” as if this is an exact count. It isn’t. It’s an estimate and likely to be a significant underestimate. A more accurate way to use this data is to say, “at least one in five women have been sexually assaulted by a man since the age of 15”.
The second source is the ABS Crime Victimisation Survey (CVS), which is a much smaller annual survey. Because the sample size is so much smaller and they’re only asking about what’s happened in the previous 12 months, the CVS data is not directly comparable to the PSS but it can be used to confirm trends over time.
The CVS also shows increasing rates of sexual assault and decreasing rates of reporting to police since 2009. The estimates it gives are different (again, smaller size, shorter time) but the trends are the same.
Why this matters
It’s important to be clear about this because the rising levels of sexual violence are being largely ignored by the people who are responsible for policy and (even more importantly) funding of services.
Kristine Ziwica’s excellent report on this in The Saturday Paper last week showed that sexual violence is still treated as an irrelevant subset of domestic violence. The National Action Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children is the strategy document that guides the whole country on policy, funding, services and response to all forms of violence against women and children – or at least that’s what it is supposed to be.
As Kristine’s article documents, in the planning for the next phase of the plan, sexual violence was barely recognised despite strong advocacy from crisis and research groups. Government ministers and agencies quickly tried to backpedal after being questioned (to the best of my knowledge, Kristine is the only journalist who asked about this) but backpedalling isn’t action.
One of the people Kristine spoke to for her article was Dr Rachael Burgin, chief executive of Rape and Sexual Assault Research and Advocacy, who said:
“… we’ve sat in consultation after consultation after consultation, and raised these issues, we’ve asked for funding, we’ve asked for attention, we’ve asked for meaningful prevention, and we don’t get it.
“We still have 10-year-olds on waiting lists for rape crisis counselling.”
In 2024, just under 11,500 girls between the age of 10 and 17 reported rape or sexual assault to police. I’m only guessing now because I don’t know how age affects reporting but even if it’s three times as likely that the rape of a little girl is reported to police, that still means almost 50,000 girls were raped or sexually assaulted last year and no one is being held accountable. No one in government is counting those girls or calculating how much we need to spend so they get the support and care they need. No one is funnelling money into preventing rape outside of adult domestic violence. No one in government is making sure the rape crisis centres have all the resources they need to care for those girls and all the women who are older but no less in need. No one is counting the non-binary people and the men who are fewer in number but no less deserving of support.
No one is counting them. No one except the structurally underfunded organisations who do their best to support all those people and despite everything they try to do, little girls are sitting on waiting lists for rape crisis counselling.
AI declaration: I do not use AI for writing or research. I do use ChatGPT occasionally to find research papers (academic databases search engines are rubbish) and for proofreading because I hate typos and without an editor my writing is full of them. Mostly I stay away from using AI for writing because the few times I tried it the results were so incomplete and unreliable that it ended up being faster and better to do it myself. I’m told AI has improved significantly since then, but I’ve chosen to not explore this because I don’t want to be tempted away from the complex imperfection of my own thoughts, voice and analysis.
I have sometimes used AI to create images, and they are all labelled as such. Graphs and data are all my own work from spreadsheets I create myself and data I download from reliable sources such as the ABS.
