Sexual Offences Committed by Children (3980/20)
Request
Please can you tell me how many children (as defined as a person under 18) were investigated by your force on suspicion of committing sexual offences in 2017, 2018 and 2019?
When you give me the information, please can you provide me with a breakdown of each child’s: – age – gender – which sexual offence they were being investigated on suspicion of – the status/outcome of the investigation for each of the years separately
If you have any queries regarding my request, then please contact me. Additionally, if you only have the information to answer one, but not all, of the above questions, please provide the information on that particular question regardless.
Response
Please find attached our response.
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.