Injury To Child (204A/22)
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act, please can you provide responses to the following questions:
1) How many reports of injury to a child under 18 were reported in total to the force between 1 Jan 2020 and 31 December 2021? Please can I have the data broken down by month and year.
1a) Please indicate where these reports were tagged as a domestic incident or having happened within a domestic setting.
1b) Please can you specify the initial classification of the crime type (including offence classification code) and what the outcome was for all the reports e.g. charge, no action
1c) Of the above, please can you also provide a breakdown of the reports by type of injury, ethnicity, and the age groups 0-4, 5-9, 10-14, 15-17. Please prioritise age groups or skip this question and move to question 2 if it will exceed the time limit.
2) How many reports of injury to a child under 18 were reported in total to the force in the calendar years 2018 and 2019? Please can I have the data broken down by year.
2a) Please indicate where these reports were tagged as a domestic incident.
CLARIFICATION
I am following up to clarify my initial FOI request dated 09/02/22 about all reports of injury to a child under 18.
‘I am seeking information about all reports of “violence against a person” and “sexual offences” where the victim is a child under the age of 18.’ For question 1b, please can violent offences be grouped together separately from sexual offences so that it is possible to distinguish between them.
Response
Please find attached our response.
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.