Record number of rape offences recorded as minister promises ‘urgent action’
New data published on Thursday showed the number of rape crimes recorded by police is at a record high, with nearly 74,000 reports in 2025.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) also revealed prosecutors are working on more rape cases than at any time in the last decade. Figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that rape accusations also rose by 29 per cent on the previous year, from 5,233 to 6,727 in the year ending December 2025.
Home Secretary Jess Phillips has promised “urgent action” to protect women and girls, including accelerating the rollout of specialist rape and sexual crime teams in every police force in England and Wales.
There has been an overall increase in sexual offenses recorded by the police over the last decade; This was largely due to improved records and increased number of victims coming forward.
Approximately 74,174 rape offenses were recorded by police in the year ending December 2025; this number was 70,898 the previous year. Home Office analysis shows this is the highest number of crimes since data began being recorded in 2002/3. According to CPS data, 1,277 rape cases were completed in England and Wales in the winter of last year.
Commenting on the record high, Ms Phillips, the minister responsible for the protection and violence against women and girls, said on Thursday: “Women and girls have been forced to change their behavior to keep themselves safe for too long. We will never accept that. So we are putting the blame where it belongs – on the perpetrators.”
“We will use the full power of the state to halve violence against women and girls within ten years.”
There was also a 5 percent increase in the total number of sexual crimes recorded in 2025, from 204,568 to 215,180.
As knife crime rates continue to fall, reports of sexual violence are on the rise.
Murders involving knives or sharp objects recorded by police forces in England and Wales fell by 21 per cent last year, while knife crime overall fell by 10 per cent, figures show.
The number of knife homicides fell from 217 in 2024 to 172 in 2025, the lowest annual number since comparable data began in 2010/11.
The decline helped reduce last year’s total number of homicides to 503, down 6 percent from 534 in 2024.
Knife crime levels recorded by police are now at their lowest since the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The number of stabbings by forces in England and Wales dropped from 54,548 in 2024 to a total of 49,151 in 2025.
This is lower than the 49,190 crimes recorded in 2021/22, but higher than the 44,728 crimes recorded in 2020/21, the first year of the pandemic.
Overall, police forces recorded 5.24 million crimes in England and Wales in 2025, excluding fraud and computer misuse; This number was down 2 percent from 5.34 million in 2024.
Katie Kempen, chief executive of the charity Victim Support, welcomed the news that knife crime figures had fallen but said “each case is too many”.
He added: “Behind every statistic is a person deprived of their life and countless friends and family struggling to come to terms with the horror of losing a loved one.”
Ms Kempen added that fraud was at “epidemic levels” and called on the government to be “bolder in its efforts to combat this type of crime”.
Crime and Policing Minister Sarah Jones said declines in violent crime showed “the direction of the journey is clear”, adding: “We will continue to build on this progress and will not stop until every community feels a change.”
