Sexual Assaults and Rapes in Hospitals (1240A/22) – *AMENDED 15/05/23*
Request
- How many sexual assaults have been reported which are alleged to have taken place at hospitals in your jurisdiction between 1st January 2019 and 4th September 2022?
- How many reports have been made to your force of rape which are alleged to have taken place at hospitals in your jurisdiction between 1st January 2019 and 4th September 2022?
- How many of the above points 1 and 2 were reported to have taken place on a hospital ward?
- How many had an outcome of ‘charge/summons’ re points 1 and 2 above?
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 within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘REASON FOR DECISION’ below).
However, although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information, relative to your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (see attached file 1240A_22_attachment.pdf). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of the request.
REASON FOR DECISION
In relation to question 3, there are no recording fields or markers on our systems to denote whether an offence occurred on a ward. Therefore, we would have to manually review each of the offences retrieved for questions 1 and 2 to try and determine this detail. However, due to the volume of records (180), this manual search 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.
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.