2,250 Rapes in 90 Days

And We are Told London is "Safe" 

 

In politics, words are cheap.
Numbers aren’t.

We’re told by Sadiq Khan and City Hall that London is “safe” and “one of the safest cities in the world”. Meanwhile, the Met’s own numbers are screaming the exact opposite.

One rape every 58 minutes

In the first 90 days of 2026, based on Metropolitan Police data, there were:

• 2,250 rapes recorded in London

• 6,716 sexual offences

• Over 16,000 stalking and harassment reports

That works out at:

• Roughly one rape every 58 minutes

• A sexual offence every 19 minutes

• Stalking or harassment every 8 minutes

This isn’t guesswork.
These are police‑recorded crimes. This is what actually makes it onto the books.

And that’s before you even touch the fact that only a fraction of rapes are ever reported, and only a small slice of those ever get anywhere near a courtroom.

January, February, March: this is the baseline

Look at 2026 month by month.

• January: mid‑700s rapes recorded in London (depending on the table, around 740–770).

• February: 714 rapes.

• March: 762 rapes.

Total for the first 90 days: 2,250 rapes.

That’s not a spike. That’s the normal operating level of the capital.

In 2025, London logged roughly 9,744 rapes – about one every 54–60 minutes, all year. A BBC investigation found over 8,800 rapes reported in 2023 and another 11,000+ other sexual offences in London alone.

And everyone who actually works with victims will tell you: most women never report at all.

So if we’re seeing a rape recorded roughly every hour, the reality on the ground is worse than that. The official statistics are the tip of the iceberg.

“Women are safe in London,” says the branding

Now put those figures next to the lines you hear from the Mayor’s office.

City Hall puts out glossy PDFs about how London “takes safety seriously” and how we’re a safe, open, global city. They brag about reductions in certain crime types and cherry‑pick comparisons when they make London look good.

Here’s what they don’t like talking about:

• Tens of thousands of sexual offences recorded every year in London.

• Rapes logged at roughly one an hour, year after year.

• CPS data showing rape‑flagged caseloads piling up and victims waiting months or years for justice.

So you end up with this situation where the PR says, “London is safe”, and the data says, “A woman is raped here every hour, and most victims will never see justice.”

Both of those things cannot be true at the same time.

This isn’t “Twitter panic”

Whenever anyone posts these numbers, the pushback is always the same:
“Context.”
“Scaremongering.”
“Social media hysteria.”

Here’s the context they never quite manage to include:

• Police‑recorded sexual offences in London run into the tens of thousands per year.

• Across England and Wales, ONS shows sexual offences have risen sharply, and sexual assault is more common now than in 2015.

• Rape Crisis and others keep saying it: the majority of rapes are never reported. The figures we see are the low estimate.

This isn’t hysteria.
It’s just reading the numbers out loud and refusing to pretend they mean something else.

You cannot look at 2,250 rapes in 90 days in one city and call that “safe” with a straight face.

Victims don’t live in talking points

The other thing you’ll never see in a press release: what this actually feels like in real life.

• A woman taking the long way home because she doesn’t trust the streets is not “safe”.

• A girl who decides not to report because she expects to be blamed or ignored is not “safe”.

• A victim stuck in the CPS backlog for a year while her case gathers dust is not “safe”.

But instead of dealing with that, we get strategy documents, slogans, and photo ops.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking: another hour, another rape recorded somewhere in London.

What does “safe” actually mean then?

If “safe” now means “less likely to be murdered than in some American cities”, maybe London scrapes a pass on a technicality.
If it means “the police will add your trauma to a spreadsheet”, then yes, we’re world‑class.

But if “safe” means women and girls can live, work, travel and go out in this city without a constant background threat of sexual violence, then by the Met’s own numbers, London is nowhere near safe.

You don’t fix that by softening the language.
You fix it by admitting the scale of the problem and actually doing something serious about it.

The only question that matters

Forget the branding. Forget the speeches. It boils down to one blunt question:

Is 2,250 rapes in 90 days acceptable in a modern capital city?

If the answer is “no”, then a few things follow:

• Stop insulting people’s intelligence by calling this “safe”.

• Treat male violence against women and girls as the crisis it is, not as a line to tick off in a policy plan.

• Put victims and enforcement ahead of image‑management and self‑promotion.

Until that happens, every time Sadiq Khan or anyone else tells you “women are safe in London”, remember what the first 90 days of 2026 actually looked like: 2,250 rapes, 6,716 sexual offences, over 16,000 stalking and harassment offences – and that’s just what got recorded.

You can call that a lot of things.
But you can’t honestly call it safety.