The story went round the papers in a day. The national children's ombudsman called it unheard of. A political party asked for more patrols. A teachers' association asked that five eight-year-olds not be called a baby gang. Everyone had a word for the attack. No one had a number.

The numbers exist. They are less comfortable than the words.
In 2024 Italy recorded 6,831 reports of sexual violence. Twenty years ago there were four thousand. The jump came after 2020: from 4,500 to almost 7,000 in four years. An all-time high. How much of that is more violence and how much is less silence, nobody knows: according to Istat, the national statistics institute, in Istat's 2014 survey, only one woman in nine reported.
In 2023, 5,832 people were reported for sexual violence. Of them, 2,524 were foreign nationals: 43 per cent, from a group that makes up about 9 per cent of residents. Per head, the ratio is seven or eight to one: 6 per 100,000 Italians against 48 per 100,000 foreigners.

And it has stayed there for ten years: the foreign share has moved between 40 and 43 per cent since 2014. The gap is real. It is not new. It is the figure everyone quotes and it explains nothing, because it sets an old population, half of it women and a quarter over 65, against a population of young males. Among those reported for sexual violence, a little over a third are under 35. In group sexual violence it is two thirds. There is one place where the comparison is clean, because the age is the same for everyone. Minors.
In 2022 Italian police reported or arrested 132 Italian minors and 159 foreign minors for sexual violence. In 2023, 138 Italians and 177 foreigners. The foreign share was 55 per cent in 2022 and 56 per cent in 2023. In the Interior Ministry's series, which starts in 2010, Italians had always been the majority, with a single exception in 2013.
Set against resident peers, in 2023 a foreign boy aged 14 to 17 was twelve times as likely as an Italian to be reported.

These are small numbers. One hundred and seventy-seven people. One group case is enough to move them ten per cent. But the direction is one: between 2022 and 2023 reports rose 8 per cent and the foreign share with them. It is not one bad year.
They are not "immigrant children". Italy has more than a million minors with foreign citizenship. The great majority were born here, go to school here, live with their families. For the State they remain foreign until they turn 18, because Italian citizenship follows blood, not soil. They sit in the "foreign" column of the statistics, and in that column they hardly show.
2023 was the year with the most sea arrivals since 2016. 18,820 unaccompanied minors arrived. Boys, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. No parents, no network, in reception centres often filled beyond capacity. They are not residents, so they are not in the denominator. But if they are reported, they are in the numerator. Part of the rise is this. Adding them to the count, the rate falls from 82 to 76 per hundred thousand. The ratio to Italians stays in double figures.

So the problem has a precise profile. Not a colour. An age, a sex, a condition: adolescent males, recently arrived, alone.
Two cautions. The first is reporting. According to Istat, a woman raped outside a relationship reports it in 4 per cent of cases when the attacker is Italian. When he is foreign, in 25 per cent. Six times as often. For minors the effect is probably stronger: a group of foreign boys in a park is seen and reported more than a classmate is. This does not cancel the gap. It shrinks it. By how much, no one has measured.
The second is the other side. The same age group holds the victims too. In 2024, 912 victims of sexual violence were minors, 88 per cent of them girls. In group attacks, among female victims under 35, almost half are between 18 and 24, and girls up to 13 more than doubled in four years: from 4 per cent in 2020 to 10 per cent in 2023.
What remains is that the girl in Bologna is six and five children kicked her for no reason. That no one knows who they are. That the only description came from a mother in a moment of panic and went from there into the headlines.
And a number remains, 177, which does not say what the headlines would like. It does not say immigrants are violent. It says the State has twenty thousand boys on their own in its care and that some of them do what boys on their own do. That can be counted. That can be changed.

Minors aged 14 to 17 reported or arrested for sexual violence in Italy in 2022 and 2023, by citizenship, with 2023 rates per 100,000 resident peers at 1 January 2024. Chart produced by Scienzaonline from data in Servizio analisi criminale, Ministero dell'Interno, "Criminalità minorile e gang giovanili" (2024); residents from Istat.

Sources
Ministero dell'Interno, Servizio analisi criminale: "Analisi criminologica della violenza di genere" (2024), "I giovani e la violenza di genere" (May 2024), "Criminalità minorile e gang giovanili" (May 2024). Istat: database Violenzasulledonne.Stat (dati-violenzadonne.istat.it), offences reported by the police 2004-2024, survey "Sicurezza delle donne" 2014 and 2025, resident population by citizenship and age. Bologna reporting: Il Resto del Carlino, 5 September 2026. Data on minor victims: Terre des Hommes, dossier indifesa 2025, from Servizio analisi criminale data. Rates per 100,000 are the newsroom's calculations on persons reported and Istat residents at 1 January 2024; "foreign" refers to citizenship, not origin, and includes children born in Italy to foreign parents; "Italian" includes naturalised citizens.