Sexual Offences Against Children (111A/20)
Request
- The number of recorded sexual offences against children aged under 18, for the period 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2020, broken down by age and gender of victims (by individual year of age where possible)
- The number of recorded sexual offences against under 18s for the above time frame that had a cyber flag attached.
Response
Please be advised that the specific information that you have requested is not available in a readily retrievable format. Due to recording errors on our systems concerning dates of birth, we are unable to provide the correct ages of the victims without manually reviewing each individual case. Therefore, 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:
However, in order to assist, we can provide the data requested using the date of birth as it is recorded on our systems – please be aware that the ages may be incorrect due to recording inaccuracies. Please find this data attached (111A_Attachment).
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.