1 in 3 violent crimes ‘going unrecorded’

MOrE than a million violent crimes a year are being left out of the Government’s official figures, distorting the true scale of offending, it was claimed yesterday.

Counting these attacks would see levels of violence increasing by 61 per cent, from 1.88million to 3.05million offences a year.

Damning new research has accused the Crime Survey for England and Wales of ‘underestimating’ the scale of the problem because the number of times each person can be counted as a victim of violence is ‘capped’ at five.

It means published levels of violence against victims who are targeted many times – especially women who suffer campaigns of domestic abuse – is artificially reduced.

Lifting the little-known cap, which has been in place since the survey was first carried out in 1981, would give a ‘completely different image’ of crime, with a 70 per cent increase violent assaults against women, from 839,000 to 1.41million a year.

Professor Sylvia Walby, an academic at Lancaster University who carried out the research, raised concerns about the accuracy of Office for National Statistics (ONS) data at a conference in central London.

She said: ‘The recent research we did found [the cap] underestimated the amount of violent crime. When we took off the cap and looked at the data, we saw an increase in violent crime of 60 per cent. It did not increase it so much when the perpetrator was a stranger but it did increase when the perpetrator was a domestic relation or an acquaintance.’

She added: ‘ This uncapping is crucial in order to understand the nature of violent crime today.’

Prof Walby said the peer-reviewed study, which used the Crime Survey from 2011-12, suggested that without a cap on victims who were repeatedly targeted, 45 per cent of violent crimes would be against women.

The ONS, which carries face-to-face interviews with 35,000 people to glean their experiences of crime, including incidents not reported to police, said it was analysing the findings with a view to changing the cap.

John Flatley, the ONS head of crime statistics, said: ‘If repeat offences were not capped, there is a risk that a small number of cases involving multiple attacks on the same person could end up skewing results, making it very difficult to spot trends in crimes.’

A recent review in the US led to their victimisation survey’s cap being increased to 10 repeat crimes.

Meanwhile, Adrian Leppard, the Commissioner of the City of London Police, said he believed crime figures compiled by police are ‘dead in the water’, as victim- based surveys offered more insight into levels of offending.