Sexual Communication With a Child (528A/20)
Request
A 1. Please tell me the number of recorded offences under s.15A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, sexual communication with a child, (Home Office recording code 71/17) recorded from (and including) October 3rd, 2019, until (and including) March 31st, 2020.
2. Where possible I would like to know the age and gender of the victim, broken down into age groups: 11 and under, 12-15, 16 and over.
3. Please tell me the age and gender of the youngest victim.
4. Please tell me all the forms of communication (e.g. text message, Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Kik etc.) that have been recorded as having been used in connection with recorded offences under s.15A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, sexual communication with a child, from (and including) October 3rd, 2019, until (and including) March 31st 2020.
5. Please tell me how many times a cyber flag was attached to the recorded crime for these dates.
B. As above but for the separate time period from (and including) April 1st 2020, until (and including) June 31st, 2020.
Where the number of victims is greater than zero but fewer than five, please use a * if necessary, rather than rejecting my request on the grounds of protecting personal information.
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 enclosed document / attached file 528A_20_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.
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.