Hospital Rape Offences (788A/23)
Request
- How many reports have been made to West Midlands police of rapes which are alleged to have taken place at West Midlands hospitals in the years 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 to date?
- How many of those alleged rapes were reported to have taken place on a hospital ward? Please break the data down by year.
- How many of the alleged perpetrators were recorded as female? Please break down per year.
- How many of the allegations resulted in a charge? Please break down per year and the number of those charged who were recorded as male/female.
Response
Following receipt of your request, a search of our crime system was carried out for rape offences with an incident location of ‘hospital/hospice’. Each of these offences were then manually examined to identify only those relevant to this request and excluding those that weren’t (for example, exclusions would include third-party reports received from hospital staff relating to disclosures of rape made to them by patients, but not alleged to have occurred in a hospital).
1. The following table shows the total number of rape offences alleged to have occurred in hospitals/hospices during the specified periods:
| Year | Total |
| 2020 | 9 |
| 2021 | 16 |
| 2022 | 33 |
| 2023 (to 30th April) | 10 |
2. There is no searchable field that allows us to accurately determine offences occurring on wards and we are therefore unable to provide this information.
3. None
4. None
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.
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