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:
Can you provide information on the following points for the following years: 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 through to end of August.
Please provide the following information relating to ‘Revenge Porn’ as set out in the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, section 33.
- How many instances of ‘revenge porn’ were reported to your police force in each of those years. Please include the outcomes of the incidents (arrest, charge, etc).
- Please include the ages and genders of the victims. If you are unable to give exact ages, please use the following brackets: 1-5; 6-10; 11-13; 14-15; 16-17; 18-21, 22-30, 31-40, 41+, unknown/unrecorded.
- Please include the ages and genders of the suspects and how many of them were known to be a current or former partner of the victim. If you are unable to give exact ages, please use the following age brackets: 1-10; 11-15; 16-20; 20-30; 31-40; 41-50; 51-60; 61+, unknown/unrecorded.
- Please include the platform/service by which the photographs or film were shared (if known).
- If possible, please indicate in each case whether the suspect threatened the victim with the material’s release.
In Response:
The information is not already held statistically nor is it held in a format that would allow its extraction from systems within the 18 hour threshold. This is particularly relevant at points 3, 4 and 5. Under the Home Office code 008/71 "Disclose private sexual photographs and films with intent to cause distress" there were 524 crimes identified within the period specified, each of which would require a manual review to establish a response to those questions. Even at a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information alone would take at least 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.
As parts of your request would exceed the prescribed limit, as defined by the Act, there is no requirement for Northumbria Police to provide a response to the remaining parts of 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 remaining questions, points 1 and 2.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
