While politicians today announced homeless move-on orders will expand beyond Auckland to every town centre in New Zealand, citing safety concerns, the actual youth crime data tells a different story in one critical category: sexual assault cases handled by youth courts have collapsed to their lowest level since 1992.

Youth court orders for sexual assault and related offences dropped to 351 in 2024, down from 429 the previous year. That's a 28% decline in just four years, and the lowest figure in the entire 32-year dataset. (Source: Stats NZ, youth-court-orders)

This isn't a blip. The trajectory is clear: in 2020, youth courts issued 489 orders for sexual assault offences. By 2024, that number had fallen to 351. That's 138 fewer young offenders being processed through the system each year for these serious crimes.

Compare that to 1996, when youth court sexual assault orders peaked at 709, more than double today's figure. Or to the decade from 2005 to 2015, when the number hovered between 500 and 650 annually. The current level represents a fundamental shift downward.

What makes this data politically awkward is timing. As the government rolls out tougher measures on youth crime and public disorder, including today's expansion of move-on powers to address what the policy implies is worsening youth behaviour, this particular category of serious offending is at a 32-year low.

Sexual assault cases in youth court aren't minor infractions. These are serious charges: rape, sexual violation, indecent assault on children and adults. The kind of offending that generates newspaper headlines and shapes public perception of youth crime. Yet the numbers have been falling steadily, year after year, with no corresponding drop in media coverage or political rhetoric about dangerous young offenders.

The data doesn't tell us why. It doesn't explain whether this reflects better prevention, changes in reporting behaviour, different police charging practices, or an actual decline in offending. What it does tell us is that whatever drove youth sexual assault cases to nearly 500 orders in 2020 has reversed dramatically.

The risk with today's policy announcement is that it treats youth crime as a uniformly worsening problem requiring uniformly harsher responses. But when youth court orders for one of the most serious categories of offending have fallen by more than half since their 1990s peak, that framing doesn't match what's actually happening in the data.

Three hundred and fifty-one cases is still 351 too many. But it's also 358 fewer than a generation ago, and 138 fewer than four years ago. That decline deserves the same attention as any increase.