Women and crime statistics - increase in sex crimes?

[shedalight]

Daily mail article:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5465541/Record-number-women-convicted-sex-crimes-Britain.html

Some 142 women were guilty of sex offences in 2016 – almost double the 74 convicted two years earlier and more than triple the number at the start of the decade

There's a disgraceful rise in the number of adults working in schools convicted of abuse. I wonder whether there are any other reasons for this increase. Might those familiar with crime statistics have an idea?

Sorry they were charged with rape but as the defendant refused to give evidence they were convicted of the lesser offence.

No they weren't. They were charged with ABH and sexual assault by penetration and they all pled not guilty to those charges. The court agreed with their not guilty pleas and acquitted them of those charges. At no point were they charged with rape.

Obviously the local press reported it wrong then.

Yes, they clearly did.

This all feels like a massive derail.

Obviously women commit crime including sex offences.
Clearly they do it at a much much lower rate than men.
That doesn't mean that the ones who do it must have excuses, nor that they are more evil than men who do, both narratives that get played out.

The inclusion of TIMs in women's stats will skew them because women commit far fewer sex offences. If we don't know whether it's men or women doing it then how do we know whether there are new issues that are coming out that need addressing?

Meanwhile look at these headlines and the 11000+ committed by men is a sideline at the end.

Women committing crime is still seen as far worse than men committing crime, to the point that men raping women, unless there is additional extreme violence, or other "interesting" circumstances, is not generally even news. The reporting also makes it seem that women commit more crime than they do - men committing crime is unremarkable. Whole thing is a minefield and filing male sex offenders under "woman" is not going to help matters.

I don't think it's a massive derail. We should be discussing the fact that women do commit these crimes whilst never forgetting that men commit 99% of them, and I don't think we should lose sight of the fact that at least some of these women committing these crimes are doing so at the behest of men and that some of these women committing these crimes might actually be men. If we are not to buy into the "angels/devils, madonnas/whores" script we need to have insight into what's going on. What we really need is accessible information about it all so we can challenge perception and change behaviour.

How can we have insight into what is going on if we don't know if these increases are down to:

Increase in women committing sex offences
Increase in women being reported and convicted
TIMs

?

On what do we base the conversation?

Yep, as I said, what we need is accessible information.