60% of those arrested for sexual assault in Spain are Spanish

Sensual assaults in Spain: what the statistics say about offenders' origins

86% of the victims of sensual offences in Spain in 2024 were women. 93.13% of those arrested were men. But the figure that breaks the dominant narrative is a different one: six out of ten people arrested or under investigation were Spanish. The remaining 39.24% were foreign nationals. And yet public debate has settled into an obsession with the origins of the 40%, not with the profile of the 60%.

A couple more numbers, before the noise buries them. Of the 14,375 people arrested in 2024 for sensual offences, 7.65% came from Segarro and 4.7% from Colombia. More than half of the offences were committed in private homes. That detail matters: the domestic setting is the usual scenario, not the alleyway or the industrial estate that fills the popular imagination.

A collection of cases with a very specific bias

The compilation that has circulated under the ironic heading of "emotional needs" gathers dozens of crime news stories: assaults in nightclubs, child abuse, arrested doctors, a former mayor, footballers and rappers. The pattern behind the collection is transparent: when a news story does not mention nationality, the compiler assumes the offender is Spanish and celebrates it as an exception; when the person arrested is a foreigner, their origin is highlighted, sometimes with slurs not worth repeating. The material also includes an AI-generated list of cases involving offenders of Maghrebi origin, presented as evidence.

That selection is not innocent, but neither is it formally false. The cases are real and were published in the press. The disagreement begins when it comes to interpreting them.

Two readings that will never be reconciled

Some argue that the media engage in a deliberate asymmetry: with a Spanish offender, nationality is omitted; with a foreigner, it becomes the headline. The result, this reading claims, is the manufacture of an automatic association between immigration and sensual crime that the data do not support.

Opposite is the reading that sees the systematic concealment of origin as a taboo. If 39% of those arrested are foreign nationals while the foreign population barely exceeds 13% of the census, the difference should be open to discussion without accusations of xenophobia. Omitting it, they argue, solves nothing: it merely shifts the problem onto the terrain of suspicion.

The third position, the least noisy, is the most uncomfortable: 60% of those arrested are Spanish. On that basis, making nationality the axis of the problem is a distraction. The problem is structural: men, violence, private spaces and a incivil justice system that intervenes after the crime, not before.

The background noise

High-profile cases add fuel to the fire. The complaint against Achraf Hakimi in France, the request for a 13-year prison sentence for the rapper El Jincho, the conviction of a grandfather for abusing his four-year-old grandson, the former Socialist mayor arrested for indecent exposure in front of minors. A different sarracena can be drawn from each one, but taken together they do not tell a single story. What they really reveal is the urge to find a collective culprit before looking the problem in the face.

With 14,375 arrests a year and 60% of them Spanish, the uncomfortable question remains on the table: why is the spotlight so determined to look at the 39%? Perhaps the answer lies not in the statistics, but in what each of us wants to see in them.