Rape and sexual assault are considered among the most serious crimes.

But unlike other serious crimes, such as murder and aggravated assault, the prosecution rate for sexual crimes committed in Pennsylvania is surprisingly low.

The national average for solving murders is around 52 percent, and in many places, including the city of Harrisburg, that rate is even higher. According to many police departments across the country, the national average for identifying and apprehending suspects in aggravated assault cases is over 40%.

But PennLive’s year-long project found that prosecutions for all reported sex crimes, including rape and child sex crimes, averaged 24% across Pennsylvania over the past five years. That figure dropped further to less than 15% in eight counties in the state.

Four counties filed charges in less than 10% of reported sex crimes.

Documenting this story involved extensive data analysis and reporting.

We started by asking the Administrative Office of the Pennsylvania Courts to run a county-by-county query that would count all sex crime cases that resulted in at least one criminal complaint per year. We worked with AOPC data experts to ensure we counted all valid sex crimes and prevented double counting. We paid AOPC analysts approximately $840 for their work.

This gave us the results: The number of sexual offense cases filed each year since 2019.

The AOPC data has caveats. It does not cover lawsuits against children, which is protected information under Pennsylvania law.

Once we had the pricing data, the hard part was determining what to make of those numbers. We compared the charges to each county’s population because counties should not have wildly different levels of sex crimes per capita. This analysis showed some outliers, including Lebanon County, which is where the idea for the story began.

Like many research projects, this one started with a clue. Dauphin County Magistrate District Judge Rebecca Margerum had learned of a reported rape in Lebanon County in which the woman named Mandy was unable to get justice from the district attorney’s office. Margerum said he knows the district judges in Lebanon County and believes the problem is bigger than Mandy’s case.

Mandy said she was told by state police that Lebanon County prosecutors cannot file criminal charges in cases where the victim knows the attacker.

Since this represents a large portion of sex crimes, we wanted to try to confirm this using data. If a county were to avoid cases where the victims knew the suspects, the number of cases filed would be disproportionately low.

It was revealed that Lebanon County ranked 66th out of 67 counties and had the lowest number of sex cases filed per capita last year.

We found other women across the state who reported being raped but said they were unable to get justice from district attorneys. The data also showed that these counties ranked among the lowest in the state.

We wanted to analyze the figures in a different way to reconfirm the anomalies.

So we used the best statistics we could find: the numbers that police departments report each year to state police and then forward to the FBI.

A look at the number of sex crimes reported to the police will give us a starting point for comparison with the “output” of criminal charges we receive from the AOPC.

We used the state police’s online database to search by county and added two categories: Part 1 rapes and Part 2 “other sex crimes” to get the total number of sex crimes reported. The database uses the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report rules; This means that only the single most serious offense against a person will be counted. This will prevent duplication, as our AOPC data is organized by number of cases, not number of charges.

If someone is raped during a burglary in which the thief takes the television set and commits other sexual crimes, that case will count as a single case of rape under UCR standards.

In the AOPC, if someone is charged with rape, burglary, theft, and other sexual crimes, this counts as a single “sex crime” case in our data.

Police data is not perfect. Police agencies may make errors when coding, counting, or entering statistics. Police departments’ interpretations of UCR guidelines may vary. But these potential flaws will apply to all crime statistics collected from the police, and there is no other way to count sex crimes.

When reporting UCR data to the FBI, police may also include cases they consider “unfounded.”

However, we did not eliminate these cases because our reports found that police sometimes unnecessarily or prematurely determined that victims’ statements were unfounded. This is part of what we’re trying to measure.

The number of false cases in any given county was generally very small; In many cases, including Philadelphia, it was zero. Counties that recorded higher numbers of “unsubstantiated” cases also generally ranked lower in terms of the number of cases prosecuted.

For example, police departments in Allegheny County, where victims and advocates have long complained about unfair treatment in sexual assault cases, rated nearly 10% of all sexual assaults reported last year as unfounded. However, national statistics show that only 2% of reported sexual crimes are believed to be fake.

Officials in some counties where data showed low prosecution rates, such as Bucks County, said they did not believe our data was valid. But they refused to provide their own data that might show otherwise. District attorneys in some of the lowest-ranking counties, such as Lebanon and Allegheny, refused to talk to us despite repeated requests.

But district attorneys in other counties, including Center, Adams, Perry and York, spent hours with PennLive reviewing their policies, procedures and beliefs about sexual assault victims.