The number of rape offences recorded by police are at a record high, with some 74,000 reported in 2025, new data published on Thursday showed.
Prosecutors are also working on more rape cases than at any point in the last decade, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) revealed. Charges for rape in the year ending December 2025 also rose by 29 per cent on the year before, from 5,233 to 6,727, figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed.
Home Office minister Jess Phillips pledged to take “urgent action” to safeguard women and girls, including hastening the roll-out of specialist rape and sexual offence teams in every police force in England and Wales.
There has been a general increase in sexual offences recorded by police in the last decade, largely because of improved recording and an increase in victims coming forward.
Some 74,174 rape offences were recorded by police in the year ending December 2025, up on 70,898 offences the year before. This is the highest number of offences since data started being recorded in 2002/3, Home Office analysis shows. 1,277 prosecutions for rape were completed in England and Wales in the winter of last year, CPS data revealed.
Commenting on the record high on Thursday, Ms Phillips, who is minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, said: “For too long, women and girls have been forced to change their behaviour to keep themselves safe. We will never accept that. That’s why we are placing the responsibility firmly where it belongs - on perpetrators.”
“We will deploy the full power of the state to halve violence against women and girls in a decade.”
There was also a 5 per cent increase in the total number of sexual offences recorded in 2025 to 215,180, up from 204,568 the year before.
The news of increasing reports of sexual violence comes as knife crime levels continue to plummet.
Homicides involving a knife or sharp instrument recorded by police forces in England and Wales fell 21 per cent last year, while overall knife crime dropped by 10 per cent, figures show.
Some 172 knife homicides were logged by forces in 2025, down from 217 in 2024 and the lowest annual number since comparable data began in 2010/11.
The fall helped drive down the total number of homicides last year, which stood at 503, down 6 per cent from 534 in 2024.
Levels of police-recorded knife crime are now at their lowest since the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A total of 49,151 knife offences were logged by forces in England and Wales in 2025, down from 54,548 in 2024.
The figure is lower than the 49,190 offences recorded in 2021/22, but higher than the 44,728 in the first year of the pandemic, 2020/21.
Overall, police forces recorded 5.24 million offences in England and Wales in 2025, excluding fraud and computer misuse, down 2 per cent from 5.34 million in 2024.
Katie Kempen, chief executive at charity Victim Support, welcomed the news that knife crime figures were falling but said that “every case is one too many”.
She added: “Behind every statistic is a person deprived of their life, and countless friends and family trying to come to terms with the horror of losing their loved one.”
Ms Kempen added that fraud was at “epidemic levels” and called on the government to be “bolder in its efforts to tackle this type of offence”.
Crime and policing minister Sarah Jones said the falling levels of violent crime showed that “the direction of travel is clear”, adding: “We will continue to build on this progress and not stop until every community feels a change”.
