Domestic Abuse – 440/23

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:

My request concerns domestic and partner abuse towards women in Northumbria.  Please can you provide me with the following information for Northumbria for each of the financial years 2018/19, 2019/20, 2020/21 and 2021/22;

1. Total number of domestic abuse-related crimes and incidents recorded by police with female victims

2. Number of domestic abuse-related crimes recorded by the police by sex of victim, and selected offence groups (violence against the person, sexual offences, miscellaneous crimes, public order offences, criminal damage and arson, other offences)

3. Number of coercive control offences recorded by police with female victims

4. Please can you provide me with a list of third sector organisations in Northumbria who support female victims of domestic and partner abuse.

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.

1. - 3. I am able to disclose the located information to you as attached and with the caveats below noted with regards to the data provided at points 1-3.

• 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.
• There are two tables in the summary for question 1.  Because there are sometimes more than one victim of a crime there are a larger number of victims than crimes.
• We cannot replicate this data for incidents as we only record the gender of the suspect and the victim if the incident becomes a crime.
• For question 2 the data relates to the number of victims as we cannot accurately count the number of offences by gender if there was both a male and a female victim linked to a single offence.
• For question 3 we are showing both the number of crimes and the number of victims.

With the above noted please see the attached.

 

4. Northumbria Police currently refer to the below agencies –

Wearside Women in Need

Impact Family Services

Domestic Abuse Team Gateshead

Harbour

NIDAS

Domestic Abuse Support Services Northumberland

Additional DA services not referred to by Northumbria Police but which are commissioned by OPCC which will be available to you on application to OPCC. There are also non-commissioned charitable organisations within the area that can be found by means of Google search.