Child Abuse - 712/20

Date Responded 20 May 2020

Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')

As you may be aware the purpose of the Act is to allow a general right of access to information held at the time of a request, by a Public Authority (including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.

You asked:

For the period 23/3/20-23/4/20 how many incidents of child abuse were

  1. reported
  2. recorded.
  3. How many investigation were launched
  4. How many arrests made

In Response:

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Corporate Development Department of Northumbria Police.  I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police.

I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows with the below caveats noted:

  • In order to provide a response to this request all incidents marked with the sexual offence opening code have been reviewed to see which meet the criteria of 'child abuse'.
  • All sexual incidents and rapes for the time period requested were downloaded and read through.  Those included are those where the victim could be identified as  being under the age of 18 years at the time of the offence, and were deemed to be child abuse.
  • Some of the incidents included are historic,  and may include incidents where the children involved were consenting but due to their age are considered to be child abuse.
  • A single incident reported may lead to multiple incidents being created due to multiple offences.
  • The data may include incidents of paedophile hunters where the victim is a decoy.
  • The incidents included will include the offence of 'Take, permit to be taken or to make distribute or publish indecent photographs or pseudo - photographs of children.' The people in the photographs may not be known to the injured party but are still included as 'child abuse'.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would expect that you to take into consideration the factors highlighted above so as not to mislead members of the public or official bodies or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.

With all the above noted I respond as follows.

  1. 101.
  2. 101.
  3. 101.
  4. 16.

 

Disclaimer

Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.

The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual property rights of Northumbria Police. Your use of the information must be strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) or such other applicable legislation. In particular, you must not re-use this information for any commercial purpose.

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