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Rape/sexual offences 056/20

Date Responded 04 February 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:

Could you please answer the following questions by providing data for each of the most recent ten years (i.e. numbers for 2009, 2010, 2011 etc).

  1. What percentage of people chose not to pursue prosecution after reporting a rape or sexual assault to the police? Please show these percentages for each sex/age group (i.e. 20% of men who reported a sexual assault in 2009 chose not to proceed with a prosecution, 45% of those age 45-60 chose not to proceed etc etc)
  2. For each year, what was the average amount of time between the rape being reported and the case being referred for prosecution?
  3. What percentage of all people making a police report of rape or sexual assault received a request to review the contents of:

i their phone

ii. their laptop

iii. their health records

iv. their school records

v. any other personal information

4. Does this police force have a budget allocated for dealing with rape and sexual assault reports

5. What is the budget.

6. What is it as a percentage of the force's total budget?

7. How many rapes/sexual assaults were reported each year?

8. How many rape kits were used each year?

9.Finally, how many rape kits were tested each year?

 

In Response:

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted within Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held in part by Northumbria Police however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.

 

  1. No information held. We do not hold/calculate % information.
  2. No information held. We do not hold/calculate averages.
  3. No information held. We do not hold/calculate % information.
  4. No information held, The force does not have a separate budget allocated for dealing specifically with rape and sexual assault reports.

5 & 6. N/a

7. This information has been provided by searches of instances where the words ‘rape’ or ‘sexual assault’ were included in the crime description. Any that were ‘attempt’ ‘allegation’ or ‘pornographic’ were then filtered out.

The results of those returns are as below. 

To note – the most recent 10 year period is 2010 – 2019, not 2009 – 2019 as per your request, and therefore that is what we have provided below.         

2010         768

2011         820

2012         596

2013         735

2014         1362

2015         1927

2016         2354

2017         2963

2018         3310

2019         2959

8&9  No information held, Northumbria Police do not use ‘rape kits’.  We do use early evidence kits – however their use is not recorded statistically and to provide a response at this point would require a manual review  of all Rape crimes, which would far exceed the permitted 18 hour time constraint

 

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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