Via Harry Hutton, some data tables covering UK crime rates over the last 100 years.
Interestingly, sexual offences against children [*] are running at less than two-thirds of their 1973 peak, despite far greater efforts to ensure they are reported. This fits with the whole "quick, let’s find a bogeyman to keep the public scared" theory behind the growth in fear of paedophiles and child abductors over the last 20 years.
However, the number of such offences has risen by 36% since its low point in 1998. This could reflect government initiatives to ensure more victims of sex crimes come forward, and that child witnesses are treated more humanely in the courts.
However, in the general spirit of the electoral campaign (ie trivialising others’ suffering and in appalling taste), I’m going to suggest it’s because New Labour is objectively pro-paedophilia, and a vote for Michael Howard is the only way to save your children from having horrible things done to them by asylum seekers and gypsies.
[*] Defined here as unlawful sexual intercourse with girls under 13 and girls under 16, incest and gross indecency with a child. I know incest doesn’t *necessarily* feature children, but prosecutions for adult incest are more than a little rare.
"sexual offences against children are running at less than two-thirds of their 1973 peak,"
There are fewer children, better-supervised. And fewer unwanted, neglected, ignored children, too. I assume the 1973 figures are constantly revised as the revelations about childrens’ residential homes, and all those Catholic priests, emerge?
There are fewer children, but not by the same proportion (the number of children aged 0-14 has fallen by 15% since 1976, which is the earliest year National Statistics has available in any convenient form. For a website with so much useful data, the NSO interface is very, very badly designed).
The figures are done by the year the crime is reported, not the year it takes place – so the 1973 figures are actually *lower* than they really should be.
I don’t want to be excessively boring and statisticky, but variation both over time and police force in police recording practices – which have never covered all the alleged crimes reported to them anyway – make this horribly inaccurate. But it is nice to know that, as I have always suspected, all that paedophilia stuff is just another utterly baseless moral panic (not inconsistent with earlier point, because, although horribly inaccurate, this is the best evidence we have).
Well, it’s not utterly baseless, because paedophiles really do exist — mostly in the form of priests in orphanages perhaps.
Can I just say that if you’re a child, you’re far more likely to be molested by a former pop star who’s had plastic surgery and changed his skin colour in the US of A than you are on these islands. Proof, if proof were needed, of the safety we enjoy in good old Blighty!