A Government report into patterns of religiously aggravated offending has concluded that the police are “most common target” of religious abuse.

It also concludes that only 5% of charges brought against people occurred at football matches or religious parades.

The report, “Religiously Aggravated Offending in Scotland 2010-11” was published this morning.

“The police were victims of the religious abuse in 42% of the charges and were the most common target,” the report said.

“These charges often referred to incidents where the police had arrested someone for an offence and were subsequently abused by him or her in religiously offensive terms.”

It adds that the public was targeted in “just over a fifth of the cases.”

The report is careful to qualify how the religious aggravation is broken down amongst sects, taking its information from police reports.

“There is no separate section within police reports for the police to state which religious belief in their view was targeted,” the report says.

“The religious beliefs or affiliations of the accused or the victims of the offence are not formally recorded anywhere in the report as they are not relevant to the definition of the crime in the law.

“This report does not present any information about the religious beliefs or affiliations of the people targeted by the offensive conduct, only the nature of the offensive conduct itself.”

It does however conclude that with that qualification, 58% of charges related to “conduct which was derogatory towards Catholicism.”

“Protestantism was the second most common subject of the religious aggravation, in 37% of the charges,” it added.

The report notes that the religious aggravations were added to breach of the peace charges, in 73% of the instances.

The Government’s proposed legislation to tackle such offending, the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Bill, is scheduled to have its Stage 3 debate before the end of the year.

The report can be read in full here.