Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many rapes were tried in the youth court last year and in each of the preceding three years; and of those, for each year, (a) how many resulted in a guilty verdict, (b) how many were sentenced in the youth court and (c) how many were referred to the Crown Court for sentencing.

The Ministry of Justice publishes magistrates’ court data on prosecutions and resulting outcomes for rape offences by age of the defendant. This can be downloaded from the Criminal Justice Statistics landing page here: Criminal Justice Statistics.

Although youth courts are not separately identifiable, the published statistics can be filtered to identify cases where the defendant was under the age of 18.