Sexual assaults in Glasgow city centre double as ‘alarm’ raised over attacks

Recently there was a thread about a 19% increase in sexual assaults on trains in Scotland (or something close to that). While nobody wants to be unsympathetic to anyone who’s had that happen, what it didn’t say was that this represented an increase from 200 to 238 in the context of many tens of millions of passenger journeys. It was noise in the numbers, not (probably) representing anything other than random chance.

Statistics are complicated things and people like to make headlines. Do we know what the actual numbers are behind this particular headline?

Go into Glasgow city centre late at night and see what kind of guys are hanging around in groups trying to chat with young drunk girls and it’s no surprise the numbers have spiked.