Dodoma – The government told Parliament on October 27 that 7,219 rape offences were reported and handled in 2025, highlighting a child-protection crisis whose scale is clearer in official data than in the parliamentary figure alone.
Deputy Minister for Community Development, Gender, Women and Special Groups Maryprisca Mahundi said the government was strengthening enforcement and survivor support, responding to questions about girls made pregnant through rape.
She urged families not to settle such allegations privately, telling MPs that “sympathy is not parenting,” and called for offenders to face the law.
The 7,219 figure is accurate but applies to Tanzania Mainland. The National Bureau of Statistics and Tanzania Police Force annual crime report records 7,219 rape offences on the Mainland and 657 in Zanzibar, making a nationwide total of 7,876 for January to December 2025.
It is an offence count, not a count of child victims, prosecutions, convictions or completed cases. Parliament’s description that the cases were “reported and handled” therefore does not, on its own, show how many reached court or what outcomes they received.
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The sharper picture of violence against children comes from the NBS’s separate 2025 gender-based violence report, also based on police records. It recorded 10,684 victims aged 0 to 17 of sexual violence, including 7,111 female child victims in its rape category and 1,648 child victims in its “sodomy” category.
The latter group included 1,410 boys and 238 girls. The report uses “sodomy” as a statistical category; the Penal Code uses the term “unnatural offences” in the relevant criminal provision.
The 10,684 child victims of sexual violence recorded in 2025 were fewer than the 11,991 recorded in 2024. But administrative data only reflect incidents that reached and were recorded by police, so the decline cannot by itself establish that the underlying level of violence fell.
A national household survey shows why recorded cases cannot tell the whole story. The 2024 Tanzania Violence Against Children and Youth Survey found that 8.4 per cent of females and 3.3 per cent of males aged 18 to 24 said they had experienced sexual violence before turning 18.
The survey uses a broader definition than the police rape category, including unwanted touching, attempted sex, physically forced sex and pressured sex. Among 13 to 24-year-olds who had experienced sexual violence, only 7.1 per cent of females and 9 per cent of males had sought help from health, police, legal or social-welfare services.
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Mahundi said survivors can receive counselling, health care and support through social welfare officers, police Gender and Children’s Desks, hospitals and local authorities. She said interrupted pupils could return after recovery, and urged use of child helpline 116 and police reporting channels.
Those services are part of the government’s stated response architecture. The National Plan of Action to End Violence Against Women and Children for 2024/25–2028/29 records police Gender and Children’s Desks, a national child helpline and One Stop Centres offering medical, psychosocial and legal assistance, while calling for stronger case management and mechanisms to fast-track cases.
The law also supports Mahundi’s warning against private deals. The Penal Code makes it an offence to seek or receive a benefit under an agreement to conceal an offence, delay prosecution or withhold evidence, although formal decisions about criminal proceedings remain governed by criminal procedure.
Mahundi told Parliament that rape and sodomy cases would receive judgments within six months. The available published laws and the national action plan do not set a universal six-month deadline, and the Judiciary’s 2025 statistics publish case and conviction totals but not the time cases took to reach judgment.
The figures show that the challenge extends beyond criminal penalties: earlier reporting, child-sensitive services, reliable referrals and evidence remain essential, particularly when abuse is concealed within families or communities.
