A man has been charged with rape and a string of sexual offences against multiple women he is alleged to have met on dating sites.
Andrew Dent, 54, of Desborough Road, High Wycombe, is accused of nine counts of rape, five counts of sexual assault by penetration, three counts of intentional strangulation, two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and one count of voyeurism, Thames Valley Police said on Monday.
Two women claim that Dent attacked them on several separate occasions after meeting him on a dating app or website.
One of the women, who is in her 30s from South Wales, alleges that she was attacked in a West Berkshire hotel and had intimate photos taken of her without her consent on the evening of June 19, 2024, police said.
The other victim, a woman in her fifties from London, said she was attacked at an address in Henley-on-Thames on the evening of October 26, 2024.
Dent was charged last Tuesday and remains in police custody.
He is due to appear at Reading Crown Court on Wednesday.
There were a total of 7,410 sexual offences reported in the Thames Valley from February 2025 to January 2026, according to official police figures.
Andrew Dent, 54, is to stand trial for a total of 20 sexual offences, nine of which being rape, at Reading Crown Court (pictured) on Wednesday
Some 2,531 of these were reports of rape, while 4,879 were non-rape sexual offences. This amounts to a rate of 2.91 sexual crimes per 1,000 people.
This is a 9.3 per cent increase on the year before, when there were 6,780 sexual offences reported between February 2024 and January 2025.
This itself is a marked increase from the same period in the 12 months before when there were 6,297 sexual offences reported.
In the most recent year, from February 2025 to January 2026, 818 of the 7,410 sexual offences reported had a ‘positive outcome’, police said. This does not necessarily amount to a criminal conviction and can mean a victim has received support or the risk of future harm is reduced.