BOTH OFFENDERS AND victims in one in seven cases of sexual violence in 2020 were under the age of 18, new figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) show.

Statistics on both Recorded Crime Victims for 2021 and Suspected Offenders for 2020 were released by the CSO today.

In 2021, 82% of victims of sexual violence were women, with 2,357 cases being reported to Gardaí.

Over half (56%) of all victims of sexual violence in 2021 were under the age of 18.

Figures for sexual violence offenders in 2020 show that almost all (98%) attackers were male, while 17% were under the age of 18 when they carried out the offence.

In 2021, males made up 69% of homicide victims in while almost half of all homicide victims were over the age of 45.

A tenth of homicide victims were under 19 while 23% were aged between 18 and 29.

 Over half of victims of reported physical assault were male in 2021 at 56%. Female victims accounted for 44%, which was down by 1 percentage point compared to 2020.

CSO statistician, Jim Dalton said that figures related to physical assault against women were higher than both 2019 and 2018.

“However, these were higher than the 41% recorded in both 2019 and 2018. This may be attributable to the relatively larger decline in the number of male assault victims in 2020 and 2021 linked to the varying levels of COVID-19 restrictions in place at the time,” said Dalton.

The CSO has said that these statistics are being released “under reservation”, which means that the quality of these statistics do not meet the standards required of official statistics published by the CSO.

According to the CSO, this is due to ongoing issues with the quality of underlying Garda PULSE data, but it is the only source of recorded crime data available to the CSO.