Revenge Porn (1653A/22)
Request
Please can you provide figures for the number of revenge porn offences where the victim was between the ages of 0-17, and the method of communication was a social media platform. Please can you break down this data by social media platform.
I’d like to request this information for the following years:
- 2021/22
- 2020/21
- 2019/20
- 2018/19
- 2017/18
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. This is because we do not have any markers on our crime recording database to flag/identify the specific platform or form of communication used in connection with recorded offences. We do have a marker for internet involved offences / online crimes, but this will not denote the specific platform used. This means that in order to determine this specific information, we would need to manually examine each individual case to identify if and where within the case file the specific platform was referenced. However, due to the number of cases that would require manually reviewing, to conduct these searches would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit then S12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
However, under Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide the information requested for the remainder of your request where an internet involved / online crime marker was applied, as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please see attached document.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
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.