Historic crime statistics: FOI release

Information requested

1) Historic crime statistics relating to unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under 16 in Scotland between 1960 and 1985, and

2) Judicial statistics for prosecutions relating to the same type of crime.

Response

I enclose a copy of some of the information you requested and apologise for the delay in responding to your original request.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested. The reasons why we don't have the information are explained below.

The Scottish Government publishes statistics on police recorded crime and criminal prosecutions as Recorded Crime in Scotland and Criminal Proceedings in Scotland, respectively. These are separate and unlinked data sets that count different things (crimes versus people prosecuted) at different times (date crime recorded by police versus date concluded in court) in different ways. The individual publications should be consulted for more details on how these statistics are produced.

Data from the time period requested predates current statistical approaches and legislation for these types of offences, especially the Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2009. As such some caution is warranted in interpreting the data provided below.

The closest we were able to match the specific request for "unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under 16" were the two historic offences of Sexual intercourse with girl under 13 and Sexual intercourse with child under 16. For this latter offence we are unable to say how many related to girls. In addition, no data are available for police recorded crimes prior to 1971 or criminal prosecutions prior to 1969. As such we can only provide data from 1971 to 1985 for police recorded crimes, and from 1969 to 1985 for criminal prosecutions.

The data we are able to provide are shown in the table below. It should be noted that, as with current statistics, police recorded crimes and people prosecuted should not be considered directly comparable. For example, a person prosecuted in court could be charged with one or multiple crimes and a court case may occur in a later year than when any offence(s) were recorded by police. Nor should these data be considered indicative of a count of victims as a single individual may be the victim of multiple crimes and a single prosecution may represent multiple crimes or victims. It may also be possible that some of these offences were historically reported, meaning they happened a year or more before they were recorded by the police. Additionally, offences of this type are often prone to going unreported. Caution is therefore also suggested in interpreting these figures as necessarily indicative of prevalence of offending in a specific year.

Table Police recorded crimes and people prosecuted for the offences of Sexual intercourse with girl under 13 and Sexual intercourse with child under 16, 1969 to 1985

Year	Sexual Intercourse with girl under 13		Sexual Intercourse with child under 16
	Police recorded	Criminal prosecutions	Police recorded	Criminal prosecutions
1969	No data	8	No data	114
1970	No data	10	No data	155
1971	No data	9	No data	128
1972	48	21	484	180
1973	50	11	527	173
1974	32	5	578	173
1975	15	12	493	153
1976	19	5	369	133
1977	23	5	329	125
1978	24	9	300	133
1979	17	5	308	104
1980	27	12	296	100
1981	30	2	231	79
1982	27	8	239	75
1983	16	2	250	83
1984	19	2	271	84
1985	25	20	350	107

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