Las estadísticas de criminalidad sexual en España: una propuesta de caracterización

Sexual violence against women and girls is one of the most brutal forms of gender violence and, at the same time, a long-silenced crime. The availability of periodic, rigorous and reliable statistics is a requirement to monitor any phenomenon of public interest and, in the case of sexual violence, an unavoidable requirement to design policies and interventions aimed at prevention, eradication, intervention and reparation. This article wants to be a contribution to the struggle of women victims of any form of sexual violence and, in particular, a political reflection of denunciation against the unjustified shortage of quantitative sources and the inexplicable low quality of the data for the study of this event in Spain. In the first part, we identify the agencies responsible for producing and disseminating sexual crime statistics, making a succinct evaluation of the main sources available. In the second part, we present a compilation of the series on sexual delinquency extracted from the different Statistical Yearbooks published by the Ministry of the Interior since 1987, noting its low capacity for a rigorous quantitative study of sexual violence.