Tables for ‘Drug misuse: findings from the 2013 to 2014 CSEW’.

This release examines the extent and trends in illicit drug use among a nationally representative sample of 16 to 59 year olds resident in households in England and Wales and is based on results from the 2013 to 2014 Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW).

This release is produced to the highest professional standards by statisticians in accordance with the Home Office’s Statement of Compliance with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.

Detailed information about the figures included in this release is available in the User Guide to Drug Misuse: Findings from the CSEW.

Future editions of this annual release will be published on dates announced via the http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/index.html" class="govuk-link">UK National Statistics Publication Hub.

While responsibility for the Crime Survey in England and Wales transferred to the Office for National Statistics on 1 April 2012, the Home Office has retained responsibility for analysis and publication of Drug Misuse figures.

For further information about illicit drug use measures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, please email: crimestats@homeoffice.gov.uk or write to:

The reports present key statistics on activity in the criminal justice system for England and Wales. It provides information for the latest 12 months (January 2013 to December 2013) with accompanying commentary, analysis and presentation of longer term trends.

Pre-release access

The bulletin is produced and handled by the ministry’s analytical professionals and production staff. Pre-release access of up to 24 hours is granted to the following persons:

Ministry of Justice:

Secretary of State for Justice; Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims; Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Minister for Prisons and Rehabilitation; Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Minister for the Courts and Legal Aid; Minister of State; Permanent Secretary; two Special Advisers; two Director Generals, Corporate Performance Group; Director General, Criminal Justice Group; Director, Crime; Director, Analytical Services; Senior policy official, Criminal Law and Legal Policy; Senior policy official, Sentencing and Youth Policy; Policy official, Sentencing; Policy official, Out of court disposals; Policy official, Youth justice; Head of News; Senior Press Officer; two further press officers; two private secretaries; seven assistant private secretaries.

Home Office:

Home Secretary; Permanent Secretary; Director of Crime; two press officers; Chief Statistician; three private secretaries.

The Judiciary:

Lord Chief Justice; Chairman of the Sentencing Council; Head of the Office of the Sentencing Council.

Other:

Attorney General; Policy Official, Cabinet Office

Tables for ‘Crime against businesses: headline findings from the 2013 Commercial Victimisation Survey’.

This publication is based on data from the 2013 Commercial Victimisation Survey (CVS), which examines the extent of crime against businesses in England and Wales. The CVS was previously run in 1994, 2002 and 2012.

This release is produced to the highest professional standards by statisticians in accordance with the Home Office’s Statement of Compliance with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.

This is an Official Statistics bulletin produced by statisticians in the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and the Office for National Statistics. It brings together a range of official statistics on hate crime from across the crime and criminal justice system, as well as the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW).

Including data from various sources in a joint publication makes it easier for users to find the information they need without having to compile it from different statistical publications. This publication allows the Government and users to examine the levels of hate crime and reporting and patterns of offending and will help Police and Crime Commissioners, police forces and other criminal justice agencies to focus their resources appropriately.

Hate crime is defined as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic’. The five monitored strands are race, religion/faith, sexual orientation, disability, and gender-identity. Crimes based on hostility to age, gender, or appearance, for example, can also be hate crimes, although they are not part of the five centrally monitored strands.

The report provides estimates from the CSEW on the level of hate crime in England and Wales, as well as information on the victims’ experience of hate crime and whether they told the police about the hate crimes.

Information from the police covers the number of crimes which were ‘flagged’ by the police, during the process of recording crime, as being motivated by one or more of the five centrally monitored strands, how the police dealt these offences, and what types of hate crime offences the police recorded.

More detailed information is available for racially or religiously aggravated offences, as defined by statute, which form a subset of total police recorded ‘flagged’ hate crimes. Information is presented from police recording through to court outcomes, including sentences handed out in court. These aggravated offences accounted for over 80 per cent of the racially or religiously motivated ‘flagged’ hate crimes recorded by the police in 2012 to 2013.

This is an Official Statistics bulletin produced by statisticians in the Ministry of Justice, Home Office and the Office for National Statistics. It brings together, for the first time, a range of official statistics from across the crime and criminal justice system, providing an overview of sexual offending in England and Wales. The report is structured to highlight: the victim experience; the police role in recording and detecting the crimes; how the various criminal justice agencies deal with an offender once identified; and the criminal histories of sex offenders.

Providing such an overview presents a number of challenges, not least that the available information comes from different sources that do not necessarily cover the same period, the same people (victims or offenders) or the same offences. This is explained further in the report.

Victimisation through to police recording of crimes

Based on aggregated data from the ‘Crime Survey for England and Wales’ in 2009/10, 2010/11 and 2011/12, on average, 2.5 per cent of females and 0.4 per cent of males said that they had been a victim of a sexual offence (including attempts) in the previous 12 months. This represents around 473,000 adults being victims of sexual offences (around 404,000 females and 72,000 males) on average per year. These experiences span the full spectrum of sexual offences, ranging from the most serious offences of rape and sexual assault, to other sexual offences like indecent exposure and unwanted touching. The vast majority of incidents reported by respondents to the survey fell into the other sexual offences category.

It is estimated that 0.5 per cent of females report being a victim of the most serious offences of rape or sexual assault by penetration in the previous 12 months, equivalent to around 85,000 victims on average per year. Among males, less than 0.1 per cent (around 12,000) report being a victim of the same types of offences in the previous 12 months.

Around one in twenty females (aged 16 to 59) reported being a victim of a most serious sexual offence since the age of 16. Extending this to include other sexual offences such as sexual threats, unwanted touching or indecent exposure, this increased to one in five females reporting being a victim since the age of 16.

Around 90 per cent of victims of the most serious sexual offences in the previous year knew the perpetrator, compared with less than half for other sexual offences.

Females who had reported being victims of the most serious sexual offences in the last year were asked, regarding the most recent incident, whether or not they had reported the incident to the police. Only 15 per cent of victims of such offences said that they had done so. Frequently cited reasons for not reporting the crime were that it was ‘embarrassing’, they ‘didn’t think the police could do much to help’, that the incident was ‘too trivial or not worth reporting’, or that they saw it as a ‘private/family matter and not police business’

In 2011/12, the police recorded a total of 53,700 sexual offences across England and Wales. The most serious sexual offences of ‘rape’ (16,000 offences) and ‘sexual assault’ (22,100 offences) accounted for 71 per cent of sexual offences recorded by the police. This differs markedly from victims responding to the CSEW in 2011/12, the majority of whom were reporting being victims of other sexual offences outside the most serious category.

This reflects the fact that victims are more likely to report the most serious sexual offences to the police and, as such, the police and broader criminal justice system (CJS) tend to deal largely with the most serious end of the spectrum of sexual offending. The majority of the other sexual crimes recorded by the police related to ‘exposure or voyeurism’ (7,000) and ‘sexual activity with minors’ (5,800).

Trends in recorded crime statistics can be influenced by whether victims feel able to and decide to report such offences to the police, and by changes in police recording practices. For example, while there was a 17 per cent decrease in recorded sexual offences between 2005/06 and 2008/09, there was a seven per cent increase between 2008/09 and 2010/11. The latter increase may in part be due to greater encouragement by the police to victims to come forward and improvements in police recording, rather than an increase in the level of victimisation.

After the initial recording of a crime, the police may later decide that no crime took place as more details about the case emerge. In 2011/12, there were 4,155 offences initially recorded as sexual offences that the police later decided were not crimes. There are strict guidelines that set out circumstances under which a crime report may be ‘no crimed’. The ‘no-crime’ rate for sexual offences (7.2 per cent) compare

Official statistics are produced impartially and free from political influence.