Image Based Abuse (1100A/22)
Request
We are requesting information held by UK police forces regarding:
- The numbers of reported incidents, charges and convictions for offences related to image-based abuse (Section 33 of the Criminal Justice and Court Act 2015) across different regions of the UK.
- The training on online and technology facilitated abuse, including but not limited to image-based abuse, received by officers and frontline staff across UK police forces within the past 5 years.
Firstly, we would like to establish how many reported i.) incidents ii.) charges and iii.) convictions for image-based abuse (Section 33 of the Criminal Justice and Court Act 2015) have been recorded by your force for the years listed individually below?
This would be for the years 2015-2022:
- 2015
- 2016
- 2017
- 2018
- 2019
- 2020
- 2021
- 2022
Secondly, what training have officers and frontline staff in your force received regarding online and technology facilitated abuse during the past 5 years?
Please provide i.) number of staff trained per year, including a breakdown by rank/category of staff receiving this training per year ii.) the name and content of the training course(s) provided per year.
This would be individually for the years 2018-2022:
- 2018
- 2019
- 2020
- 2021
- 2022
Clarification received 24/08/2022:
We would only need details re the offences under Home Office code 008/71.
Response
Please find attached our response. However, in relation to question iii.), the force is unable to provide conviction data as this information is not routinely fed back into our systems, and we do not have access to magistrates’ court data.
Please note that these data should be interpreted with caution. Comparing numbers of incidents/crimes can be misleading and does not necessarily indicate the likelihood of someone being a victim of crime. In addition, the number of incidents/crimes recorded in an area over a period of time can be influenced by a number of factors. Consequently statistics on incidents/crimes for one period may not necessarily be a good indicator of future incidents in that area.
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.