Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate her Department has made of the number of girls aged (a) 11 to 14 and (b) 15 to 18 who have been referred to the police with sexual exploitation and/or sexual violence assessed as a factor in each of the last three years.

All forms of sexual violence against children are terrible crimes, which have devastating consequences on young lives. The Government is determined to protect and support those who are targeted, exploited and harmed by criminals. We are working to improve our understanding of the scale and nature of child sexual abuse, to enable us to better prevent and disrupt offending. We use data gathered through the Office of National Statistics England and Wales Crime Survey to understand the number of victims and their ages. We also draw on the research and insight produced by the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, which we established in 2017, and the insight of other experts including the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse.

The Home Office does not receive data on cases referred to the police, but instead collects data on offences recorded by police.

In 2021, the Office for National Statistics published data on the gender and age of victims of all sexual offences between March 2019 and March 2020, excluding image offences, in the records of 24 police forces. This data shows that 24.1% of female victims of sexual offences were aged 10 to 14 and 21.0% of female victims of sexual offences were aged 15 to 19.