More than half of the victims of sexual assault in the past year were under the age of 18

New data has shown that more than half of the sexual assault victims recorded by Gardaí last year were under the age of 18.

he Central Statistics Office (CSO) has released the latest statistics on victims and suspected perpetrators of serious crimes recorded by An Garda Síochána over the past two years.

According to the analysis, in 2021, four in five (82 percent) reported incidents of sexual violence involved a female victim, and more than half (56 percent) of the victims were under the age of 18 at the time of the offence.

The report found that the “vast majority” (98 percent) of suspected perpetrators of identified sexual violence reported in 2020 were male, and one in six were under the age of 18 at the time of the incident.

In one in seven (15 percent) cases of sexual violence identified in 2020, both the victim and the alleged perpetrator were under the age of 18.

As for homicides, seven out of ten (69 percent) victims of reported homicides last year were men.

The data also shows that nearly half (49 percent) of all murder victims were 45 years of age or older.

While 10 percent were under the age of 18 and nearly a quarter (23 percent) were between the ages of 18 and 29.

Over half (56 percent) of victims of reported physical assault and related crime in 2021 were male.

CSO statistician Jim Dalton said: “The proportion of victims of reported physical assault and related crimes who were female was 44 percent in 2021, down slightly from 2020 (45 percent).

“However, these were higher than the 41 percent recorded in both 2019 and 2018. This may be due to the relatively larger decline in the number of male assault victims in 2020 and 2021, related to the different levels of Covid-19 restrictions in place over time.”