A post on X by user Harry Eccles, published on 4 August 2026 and viewed more than 143,000 times, makes two assertions: that 88% of sex offenders in the UK are "White British", and that the political party Reform disproportionately publicises cases involving non-white suspects. The post has circulated widely enough to warrant a careful look at what the official figures actually show.
The starting point for any check is the ethnicity data published by the Ministry of Justice, the Office for National Statistics, the National Police Chiefs' Council and the Crown Prosecution Service. None of the statistics provided for this review contains a figure of 88% for "White British" sex offenders. The closest available data points are found in the National Police Chiefs' Council's 2024 analysis of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders, where 85% of suspects were recorded as White, and 3.9% as Pakistani. A separate review of 2023 data by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies found that 83% of child sexual exploitation suspects and 85% of victims were White. The November 2024 Ministry of Justice bulletin on ethnicity and the criminal justice system does not give a single headline figure for the ethnicity of sex offenders, instead describing patterns across defendants, prisoners and victims more generally. The specific 88% claim therefore cannot be traced to a recognised official source.
There are also important category mismatches that make the post's wording inaccurate even where the general direction of travel is correct. The "White" category used by police and courts is broader than "White British", and includes White minority groups such as Gypsy, Irish Traveller and other White backgrounds. The post's substitution of "White British" for "White" is not a harmless rewording, because it implies a more restrictive group than the published data covers. The geographic scope is also imprecise: the Crime Survey for England and Wales, the police recorded crime series and the Crown Prosecution Service rape data all relate to England and Wales rather than the UK as a whole, and Scotland and Northern Ireland maintain separate justice systems with their own offender demographics.
The data itself is also partial. The Ministry of Justice bulletin warns that 33% of magistrates' court defendants and 36% of Crown Court defendants have an unknown ethnicity, and that since August 2024 the new criminal legal aid system has stopped collecting ethnicity data at all, pushing more records into the "unknown" category. The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies notes that only about 30% of records in the 2024 group-based abuse dataset included ethnicity information, and that fear of stoking community tensions has historically discouraged officers from recording it. A precise "88%" headline figure is therefore implausible on the available evidence, because the underlying data is too incomplete to support that level of precision.
The second half of the post, accusing Reform of only tweeting about "the brown ones", is a rhetorical claim about editorial behaviour that no official statistic can directly confirm or deny. The Crown Prosecution Service's September 2025 disclosure of rape prosecutions and convictions broken down by self-reported ethnicity in 2024/25 exists, but the actual numbers sit in an attached Excel spreadsheet that was not provided here, so the racial distribution of rape defendants cannot be quoted. Even setting aside the disputed 88% figure, the underlying allegation of selective media coverage cannot be tested against the materials supplied. The most that can be said is that official data shows the majority of recorded sex offenders in England and Wales are White in the broader sense used by the criminal justice system, while acknowledging that the exact share, the share who are specifically White British, and the comparative share for the UK overall all remain uncertain given the gaps in recording.
