Revenge Porn (505A/23)
Request
- The number of arrests for each of the following: (i), Managing or assisting in the management of a brothel, (ii), loitering for the purposes of prostitution, (iii), soliciting for the purposes of prostitution.
- The number of arrests for revenge porn offences under Section 33 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 and how many resulted in a conviction.
- The number of reports of revenge porn that mention the use of OnlyFans and how many led to a conviction.
- The number of complaints made against officers and staff members when reporting offences of revenge porn (Section 33), Sexual harassment and Sexual Assault (Equality Act 2010).
For the above, could I please have information collected from the calendar year 2018-2023. For 2023 please give me the data from 1 Jan up to 22 March.
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. In relation to question 4, there are no allegation types on our PSD systems for ‘revenge porn’. The force introduced new recording regulations in 2020 (such as Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment), however, we would still be unable to identify whether these allegation types pertained specifically to revenge porn without conducting a manual review of each of the cases. We estimate that at a minimum of 10 minutes to read through each case file, this search would equate to around 33 hours of work. Such a search, however, would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12). Please be advised that this time estimation does not include the time that has already been spent on this request to retrieve the information for questions 1 – 3.
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 questions 1 – 3 as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please see attached document (505A_Attachment).
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: