Why Scotland’s sexual offence data has a blind spot at its centre

When Scotland publishes its annual sexual offence statistics, the figures are detailed enough to shape legislation. They tell ministers how many allegations were made, how many cases reached court, and how many ended in conviction.

What they do not tell Parliament is how many allegations were later found, on investigation, to have no basis in fact.

That is not a technical gap. It is a blind spot.

The recorded crime figures published by the Scottish Government sit alongside Crown Office case processing data and material from Police Scotland. The Scottish Crime Recording Standard sets out how complaints are logged in the first place. Together, they produce a detailed picture of how allegations move through the system.

What they do not produce is a clear, visible account of what happens when an allegation is shown to have no basis in fact. The system records the allegation. It does not clearly record the correction.

Debates about sexual offence law in Scotland now lean heavily on published figures. Reporting rates, conviction rates, attrition. Those numbers are used to argue that the system is failing complainers, and that further reform is needed. Some of that argument may be right. But it rests on a dataset that is only partial.

There is no equivalent, accessible figure showing how often allegations are later found not to have happened. Cases where no offence occurred, established by investigation, admission, or subsequent evidence, do not appear as a distinct category in the data most people rely on. Instead, they sit somewhere inside broader outcomes: no further action, insufficient evidence, acquittal. Categories that tell you nothing about whether the allegation itself was true or false.

That leaves a gap at the centre of the system’s own understanding of what it is doing.

This is not about turning one category into a headline number. It is about whether the system is capable of describing all of its outcomes with any clarity.

It is often said that focusing on false allegations risks discouraging genuine complainers. That concern is real, and it cannot simply be waved away. But the answer cannot be to avoid measurement altogether. If cases where no offence occurred are rare, recording them would show that. If they are not, that matters too. Either way, the system should be able to say what it finds.

Accused.scot’s own FOI work points to the same structural problem elsewhere in the system. In one response, the Crown Office said there was no searchable category for cases involving the Moorov doctrine, and that identifying them would require staff to examine files individually. In another, the court system confirmed there was no electronic marker or field to identify Moorov directions across cases. These requests were about different issues, but the underlying problem is the same: important questions become unanswerable when the data is not built to show them. We Asked How Often Moorov Is Used. The System Cannot Answer and Blind Spots in the System cover the detail.

That has consequences. Parliament is being asked to consider changes to procedure, evidence, and trial structure. The Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Act 2025 is part of that wider shift. More reform is likely. Those decisions are being made using data that tracks one side of the process in detail and leaves the other side largely unexamined.

None of this requires guessing at difficult cases. Many cases end without a clear answer. That is the nature of criminal law. But some cases do reach a clear conclusion that no offence occurred. The fact that those cases are not visible in any consistent way is a problem of record, not interpretation.

Scotland already recognises, in other contexts, that deliberately false reporting can have legal consequences. The principle is not unfamiliar. What is missing is any clear way of measuring it.

That is the question facing the Scottish Government, Police Scotland and the Crown Office. If this category of case is real, it should be visible in the public record. If it is rare, the data will show that. If it is not, the data should show that too. But a justice system that is reshaping procedure in these cases cannot go on measuring only the outcomes that fit its existing reporting habits. A system that uses statistics to justify reform should be able to account for all of its outcomes.