What do Statistics Finland’s detailed prosecution and conviction tables show for rape and sexual harassment by year 2022–2024?

1. What the raw counts show: recorded rape and sexual harassment rising in 2023–2024

Statistics Finland’s time‑slice releases report that under the new 2023 definitions police recorded 278 rapes in January–March 2023 and 436 in the same quarter of 2024, while for the first half of 2023 there were 611 recorded rapes and for the first half of 2024 there were 910 — all figures reported by Statistics Finland in quarterly and half‑year summaries ^{[5] [3] [1] [2]}. These releases also show growth in the new statutory category of sexual harassment: 241 cases were recorded in Q1 2023 versus 255 in Q1 2024, and 611 sexual‑harassment cases in the first half of 2023 rose to 666 in the first half of 2024 ^{[5] [3] [1] [2]}. National and municipal police bulletins echo that sexual‑offence reports increased sharply in 2023–2024, with the Helsinki Police noting sexual harassment made up about 22% of sexual offences in 2024 and reporting that harassment reports doubled in their district compared with 2022 ^[6].

2. Why the counts jumped: a legal‑definition change and reporting effects

A core reason these year‑to‑year comparisons are not apples‑to‑apples is that Finland amended its sexual‑offences legislation on 1 January 2023, broadening the definitions of rape, emphasising consent and expanding the scope of sexual harassment to non‑physical acts (this change is explicitly noted in Statistics Finland’s releases) — a structural shift that raises recorded offence totals independently of any change in the underlying incidence ^{[1] [2] [3]}. Multiple official releases underline that the figures from 2023 onward are reported “as defined in the new legislation,” signalling that increased counts reflect at least partly the broader legal definitions and not solely higher crime incidence ^{[5] [1]}.

3. Prosecutions, convictions and sentences: increases but incomplete public detail

Statistics Finland’s prosecutions/sentences release for 2023 shows that criminal convictions overall edged up slightly to 51,856 and that sentences for sexual offences were 33 per cent higher in 2023 than in 2022, indicating more cases reaching conviction or sentence stages ^[4]. Independent compilations also record that the number of “solved” rape offences increased to 990 in 2023, which aligns with the pattern of more cases being processed through the justice system after the reform ^[7]. That said, the publicly available summaries and press releases do not publish the full, detailed prosecution‑and‑conviction line‑by‑line tables in an immediately transparent way in the cited extracts, so granular counts (for example, prosecutions initiated vs. convictions handed down for rape and for sexual harassment broken out by year 2022, 2023, 2024) cannot be fully reconstructed from the provided texts alone ^{[4] [7]}.

4. How to interpret the trend and what remains uncertain

The data provenance warns against a simple headline that “rapes skyrocketed”: much of the upward movement coincides with the 2023 legal redefinition and with improved reporting and recording, while prosecutions and sentences did increase in 2023 — suggesting more cases progressed into the courts — but the available public extracts do not supply the full prosecution and conviction tables necessary to determine conviction rates, case attrition, sentencing severity trends or the precise year‑by‑year prosecution volumes for 2022–2024 in a single reconciled table ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [7]}. Where sources do provide single‑year snapshots, they are consistent with an increase in recorded offences and a rise in solved and sentenced sexual‑offence cases in 2023–2024, but final judgments about changes in actual offending versus definitional and procedural factors require the detailed OSF table extracts and caseflow data that are not present in the provided material ^{[2] [4]}.