Member

In 2021, a “File on 4 Investigates” programme on BBC Rado 4 used freedom of information requests to police forces and declared, as a consequence of the information received, that there had been a huge spike in female-perpetrated child sexual abuse. There were hysterical headlines on women who abuse, with all sorts of academic discussions on the rise of female paedophilia. But it all went a bit quiet when everybody realised that this was based on statistics that conflated sex and gender, and that perhaps this new crime epidemic was not quite as it seemed. It could have been, but we do not know because the statistics are not reliable. That is a real problem.