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:
The number of reports/allegations made by males claiming they were drugged and raped in the three years from January 2017.
- Details held of all those allegations
- the number of arrests in cases of this nature and the number of charges -all incidents/reports/allegations logged containing the word GHB and the nature of the complaint -ages of those charged
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, however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
To establish a response for your request would require approximately 524 cases to be located and manually reviewed to establish which met the criteria specified by your request ie to confirm if the victim had been drugged and raped. Even at a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 43 hours, therefore Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act would apply. This section does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimated that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours, equating to £450.00.
You should consider this to be a refusal notice under Section 17 of the Act for your request.
However, in order to provide you with some assistance, under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, an initial assessment of the information that may be provided within the time constraints would be the figures on male rape, and provide some further information based on an MO keyword search eg “GHB” as originally requested. However please note that we are unable to provide data on how many males have been drugged and raped.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
