Fact check: What percentage of arrests for sexual assault against children is comprised by self-identified conservatives/Republicans?

1. Why one-off headlines don’t equal a percentage: the limits of case-based reporting

News reports about individual arrests, such as the June 2025 arrest of South Carolina state representative RJ May, document specific alleged criminal conduct but do not provide denominators necessary to calculate a percentage of child-sexual-assault arrests attributable to conservatives or Republicans ^[1]. Journalistic pieces cited here describe the facts of the arrest, the charges, and local legal proceedings; they do not aggregate arrest records across jurisdictions or include political self-identification fields that would let researchers compute a reliable share ^{[1] [4]}. Using incident-based coverage to infer broader prevalence risks severe selection bias because media attention is uneven and often focused on public figures rather than the full arrested population ^{[5] [2]}.

2. What the available compilations show — lots of names, no percentages

Compilations of misconduct allegations against lawmakers or public figures identify numbers of accused individuals—such as lists recounting lawmakers accused since 2017—but those lists are oriented toward public officials and sexual misconduct broadly, not arrests for child sexual assault tied to political affiliation, so they cannot serve as a basis for the requested percentage ^{[5] [2]}. These datasets are helpful for tracking institutional patterns and partisan dynamics in how allegations are handled, but they systematically omit the wider universe of arrests handled by criminal justice systems ^[2]. Consequently, any attempt to calculate a percentage from such lists would misrepresent the difference between allegations, charges, and arrests across the entire population.

3. What data would be required to answer the question rigorously

To compute the percentage asked, researchers need integrated datasets recording arrests for sexual offenses against minors that also include reliable measures of political self-identification or party registration. Law-enforcement arrest logs rarely collect ideology or party, and media reporting of political identity is available mainly for public figures, not for the typical arrested person; therefore, the core data elements simply do not align in the sources examined here ^{[6] [4]}. Without statewide or national law-enforcement datasets linked to voter-registration or self-identification surveys—and careful handling of privacy, misclassification, and sampling biases—any percentage estimate would be speculative and likely misleading.

4. Competing narratives in coverage — examples used for political arguments

The coverage in the provided analyses shows competing narratives: stories about individual Republican lawmakers arrested for child-related offenses are sometimes used to argue about party accountability, while other reporting highlights bipartisan problems of sexual misconduct in legislatures ^{[1] [2]}. These frames can serve different agendas—some aim to spotlight hypocrisy or demand stricter oversight, whereas others emphasize systemic cultural issues in institutions. The reporting cited does not resolve those debates because it lacks cross-cutting quantitative evidence that would allow fair comparison of partisan prevalence ^{[5] [2]}.

5. Reporting and selection biases that distort apparent partisan proportions

Media attention concentrates on elected officials and high-profile defendants, leading to selection bias: coverage disproportionately surfaces cases involving public figures whose party is known, while ordinary arrests that form the numerical majority remain invisible in these sources ^{[1] [3]}. This creates a misleading impression that the problem is concentrated in one political camp when, in reality, the available articles simply reflect what is newsworthy rather than what is numerically representative ^{[4] [2]}. Any credible estimate must correct for those reporting differentials.

6. What conclusions are supportable from the available material

From the sources analyzed here, the only supportable conclusions are descriptive and limited: isolated arrests of individuals who identify as Republican or conservative have been reported (for example, RJ May), and broader compilations document numerous accused lawmakers from multiple parties, but no data in these materials provide a valid percentage of child-sexual-assault arrests attributable to conservatives/Republicans ^{[1] [2]}. Researchers and policymakers seeking that figure must rely on purpose-built datasets combining arrest records with verified measures of political identification, or on carefully designed surveys and administrative-linkage studies that do not appear in these sources.

7. Practical next steps for someone who wants the actual percentage

To obtain a defensible percentage, request or construct a dataset that links criminal-arrest records for sexual offenses against minors with party-registration or verified self-identification, ensure clear definitions (arrest vs. charge vs. conviction), and apply methods to correct for reporting and selection biases; absent such work, any headline percentage would be unreliable ^{[6] [4]}. The materials reviewed here highlight individual cases and partisan framing but do not furnish the quantitative basis needed to answer the user's question.