Nearly half of the violent sex attacks in Italy are committed by foreigners, according to data released by the Italian statistics agency ISTAT.
The data released by the statistics agency states that around 42 per cent of the violent sex crimes against women in Italy are committed by foreigners, with non-European Union citizens representing a significant portion of sex attackers.
The figures, which represent incidents from 2018, reveal that there were 4,802 violent sex attacks that year and that 2,009 of them involved foreign attackers, newspaper Il Giornale reports.
The newspaper points out that the proportion of foreign sex attacker is exceptionally high compared to the foreign share of the Italian population, which sits at around 8.6 per cent.
Of the 41.8 per cent of sex attackers, 35 per cent come from countries outside of the European Union, with Moroccans and Nigerians making up a large proportion fo the non-EU attackers.
Foreigners are also vastly overrepresented in the exploitation and aiding of prostitution with 68.8 per cent of such crimes attributable to migrants.
Migrants are also said to be involved in nearly a quarter of child sex abuse cases and migrant women account for one in four victims of sexual abuse.
According to Il Giornale, there are concerns the numbers may be even higher, as many migration-background women may not report sex attacks to authorities out of fear for their own personal safety.
In 2018, the Italian Interior Ministry revealed that migrants and foreigners commit nearly a third of all crime in the country, and a 2016 study suggested that foreigners were twice as likely as Italians to engage in criminal behaviour.
Other European countries have reported similar statistics regarding migrant crime rates, such as Germany, where last year it was reported that Germans were far more likely to be a victim of migrant crime than the other way round.
Earlier this year, Norwegian lawmakers showed that migrants, particularly Somalians, were vastly overrepresented in violent crimes.