Clive Pinder
The Daily Sceptic
Immigration and Sexual Violence – Nothing to See Here!
Britain is now the sort of country where you can get an instant answer to ‘What is the carbon footprint of a sausage roll?’. Yet if you ask, ‘Are we importing risk to women along with importing people?’ our nation state stares at its shoes and starts muttering about ‘complexity’.
Let us begin with two official lines that any half-awake citizen can see are rising at the same time.
Line one, sexual violence. The ONS crime bulletin for the year ending June 2025 reports 211,225 sexual offences recorded by the police in England and Wales are up nine per cent from the previous year. It also reports 72,804 rape offences, up six per cent year on year, with rape making up around 34 per cent of all recorded sexual offences.
The ONS, to be fair, sticks in a big asterisk. Part of the rise is not a sudden outbreak of more predators. It is a change in the bookkeeping. That means some of what now shows up as an ‘increase’ is simply behaviour that was previously recorded differently, or not cleanly separated at all, now being captured under a new label. In short, not every uptick is more men doing worse things in dark alleys.
Fine. Caveat accepted. The numbers are still brutal.
Line two, immigration. The ONS estimates long term immigration at 898,000 in the year ending June 2025. Of those, non-EU nationals accounted for 670,000, about 75 per cent of the total. Net migration in that year is estimated at 204,000.
If you want proof mass migration has changed Britain, bin the pamphlets, the marches and the sermons. Just open the ONS, click twice, then stick the kettle on and watch the country redraw itself in numbers.
When you have done that, do not stop at the headline ‘flow’ figure, those who arrived this year. That is only the annual intake. The canary in the coal mine is the cumulative influx. The stock, who is here now, how large it has become, and what that does over time to social norms, policing demand, and risk. On that, the official trend is not subtle.
According to the ONS, the foreign-born stock in England and Wales has risen almost 150 per cent in 22 years. From 4.6 million residents born outside the UK in 2001, to 11.4 million in 2023. In that time the Commons Library, citing an ONS ad hoc estimate, shows the percentage has more than doubled from 8.9 per cent to 19 per cent of the population. That’s almost one in five. Of those roughly 8.0 million were born outside the EU, about 13 per cent or one in eight.
That is not a marginal tweak, it is a demographic rewiring, delivered at motorway speed.
Even if net migration dips this year, the change does not politely stop at Passport Control. This is the ministerial dodge. Wave one year’s inflow figure, declare victory, move on. But if the mechanism is cumulative, a one-year wiggle tells you almost nothing about this year’s risk.
You can see the cumulative shift even in the baby name tables. Muhammad is now the top boys’ name in England and Wales, and it has been in the top 10 since 2016.
More importantly, the engine is now domestic as well as imported. In 2023, 37.3 per cent of live births in England and Wales were to parents where one or both were born outside the UK. On the mother-only measure, births to non-UK born women rose from 31.8 per cent in 2023 to 33.9 per cent in 2024. That is the second-generation pipeline in plain numbers, large, growing, and largely indifferent to whatever headline flow figure ministers are waving around this week.
Put those lines next to the ONS crime line and you get a chart that reads like a warning label. The foreign-born share keeps rising. Recorded rape remains staggeringly high. And what once would have meant a ministerial resignation is now treated like a routine Tuesday briefing. Another awkward graph to be managed rather than a crisis to be answered.
That is correlation. It is not proof of causation, but it is not nothing either. If government wants the public to stop drawing conclusions, government needs to do the grown-up thing and test the hypothesis properly.
Instead, we get the dueling spreadsheets.
Here is the problem. We are arguing over scraps. Campaigners like Matt Goodwin point to FOI driven figures and claim foreign nationals, around 11 per cent of the population, account for roughly 22 per cent of rapes and 26 per cent of sexual assaults. They ask why Britain will not publish this routinely. Meanwhile journalists like Fraser Nelson of the Times push back, arguing the ‘migrant crimewave’ story is overcooked, noting that violent crime is at multi decade lows, and even the headline MoJ claim that foreigners are convicted of up to 23 per cent of sex crimes is disputed.
Which rather proves the point. When a country has to rely on complex FOI requests rather than publish one clear, repeatable, annual bulletin, everyone ends up fighting with partial numbers and competing narratives. We have already seen where this ends with the grooming gangs’ scandal. Years of official denial and nervous statistical silence left unprotected and disbelieved girls to pay the price. It is exactly how we end up with pub verdicts and online lynch mobs.
We get endless official output on crime and immigration volumes. Charts, dashboards, glossy bulletins, the lot. Yet the moment you ask the state to connect them like adults. Who is offending? Where they were born? What their status was? How long they have been here etc? The information that actually matters to the public argument suddenly becomes curiously unavailable.
We can almost hear the civil service machine whirring.
If ministers published a clear annual table showing serious sexual offence charges and convictions by country of birth, nationality at time of offence, immigration status at time of offence, and time resident in the UK, one of two things would happen.
If the link is small or nonexistent, it would calm the debate and allow government to say, ‘Look, it is not that.’
If the link is meaningful in certain cohorts or settings, it would force government to do difficult things, such as tougher enforcement, tougher integration requirements and deportation where legally possible. All without hiding behind slogans.
Either way, proper measurement creates accountability. Shamefully, accountability is the one thing our politicians and the civil service we pay for avoids like an email from a Nigerian prince! (Before anyone faints, I can write that as I was born and raised there.)
This is not a statistical oversight. It is a political tradition. Inaugurated by Blair’s machine, refined by Campbell’s spin doctrine. Then inherited by every administration since like a family heirloom. Do not measure it properly. Do not publish it clearly and you can always claim the truth is ‘complex’.
Of course, the missing breakdown is not, by itself, proof of a criminal cover up. There are real problems. Patchy data, inconsistent force recording, privacy rules, shifting definitions, and plenty of scope for sloppy analysis. Fine. But a serious state fixes those problems. Our state uses them, year after year, as camouflage.
The outcome is clear. If you do not publish the table on immigration, demography and sexual violence, you cannot expect the public to trust your assurances. You create a vacuum and that vacuum fills with suspicion, anger, and increasingly nasty generalisations.
Meanwhile the same people who refused to publish the table hold a conference about ‘community cohesion’. It is like refusing to install smoke alarms and then complaining about the smell of smoke.
What a serious state would publish.
If the UK was run like a grown-up country, the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice would stop faffing about with glossy platitudes and publish one annual bulletin. One. Not 20 PDFs. Not a ministerial tweet thread. Not a seminar on ‘complexity’. A single checkable set of numbers that addresses, clearly and reproducibly:
- For rape and serious sexual offences, charges and convictions by offender country of birth and nationality, with proper population denominators.
- The same by immigration status at time of offence, including asylum route categories where relevant, with proper denominators.
- Rates adjusted for age and sex structure, because young men drive most violent and sexual offending everywhere.
- Regional breakdowns, because patterns are never uniform.
- Clear caveats on reporting and recording, including the impact of new offence codes and counting rules, so the public is not misled.
Then, and only then, can we have the argument that politicians keep demanding we do not have. A transparent and constructive debate based on facts instead of vibes.
Until that happens, the public will continue to do what humans do. They will take the ONS crime trend, take the ONS migration trend, notice that Britain has undergone an enormous non-European inflow, notice that recorded rape remains staggeringly high, and draw their own conclusions.
The state can either measure the relationship properly, or it can keep pretending that refusing to measure it is ‘responsible’. One of those choices builds trust. The other builds resentment.
And resentment, unlike spreadsheets, does not stay missing for long.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
