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:
- Please provide the number of recorded offences that relate to s.15A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, Sexual Communication with a child, HO Crime Code 71/17 between April 2018 and April 2021. Please, where possible, provide the ages of the victims and offenders if known, break the data down by month and year.
- Please provide the method of communication with the child and the App used to communicate eg. Text, Whatsapp, Facebook, Snapchat, Omegle, Kik, Discord, Twitter, Tiktok, Twitter, other chatroom etc) for all recorded offences relating to s.15A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, sexual communication with a child, HO Crime Code 71/17 between April 2018 and April 2021. Please break the data down by month and year.
- Please provide the Outcomes for all s.15A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, sexual communication with a child, HO Crime Code 71/17 between April 2018 and April 2021. Please break the data down by month and year.
In Response:
- 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.
- Data has been taken from the relevant databases.
- The crime MO was to identify the platform, as provided in the request, that each offence was stated to occur on.
- Of note, searches were made for both "tik tok" and "tiktok" as it may be written both ways.
- One crime may state multiple platforms, eg messages on both WhatsApp and via text.
- Any that were flagged as text have been checked to make sure they actually relate to a text message, rather than text displayed as part of a message on another platform.
- Anyone under "eliminated" has been removed from the offender count.
- Anyone under "informant" or "witness" from the victim count have been removed to prevent over-counting.
With all the above noted I am able to disclose the located information to you as attached .
