Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many cases of sexual abuse against children and young people have been reported to police in each of the last five years.

The police recorded crime data that the Home Office receives from the police forces of England and Wales relate only to how many crimes are recorded and not how many reports are received. It is only possible to centrally provide figures for certain sexual offences that identify the age of the victim in statute, namely:

 Rape of a female child under 16
 Rape of a female child under 13
 Rape of a male child under 16
 Rape of a male child under 13
 Sexual assault on a female child under 13
 Sexual assault on a male child under 13
 Sexual activity involving a child under 13
 Sexual activity involving child under 16
 Sexual grooming (the victim must be under 16)
 Abuse of children through prostitution and pornography (under 18)
 Abuse of position of trust in a sexual nature (under 18)

Data for these offences are shown in Table A4 of the ONS quarterly release, the most recent of which is available here
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/crime-stats/crime-statistics/period-ending-june-2014/index.html

Recent increases in the overall number of recorded sexual offences have been attributed by the Office for National Statistics to a) the willingness of victims to come forward and report these crimes to the police, partly due to wider ‘operation Yewtree effect, where victims of sexual offences that are not directly connected to Yewtree are now reporting these offences to the police, and b) an improvement in crime recording by the police for these offences.