Sexual Offences - 760/21

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:

1. The number of sexual offences (described in point 3) that have taken place in each of the financial years 2017/18, 2018/19, 2019/20, 2020/21 and 2021 up to 26/05/21 where the perpetrator is under 18 and the victim is under 18. If the sexual offence took place in a school, please state this.

2. Please state which offence took place, as categorised by the Sexual Offences Act 2003:
• Rape (s.1)
• Assault by penetration (s.2)
• Sexual assault (s.3)
• Causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent (s.4)
• Rape of a child under 13 (s.5)
• Assault of a child under 13 by penetration (s.6)
• Sexual assault of a child under 13 (s.7)
• Causing or inciting a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity (s.8)

3. Please provide the age of the victim.

4. Please provide the gender of the victim.

5. Please provide the age of the perpetrator

6. Please provide the gender of the perpetrator

7. Please provide the outcome of the police investigation e.g. NFA/suspect charged.

In Response:

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted within Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police.

I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows.

Please see the attached document which should satisfy your queries, with the following caveats noted:

• Crimes have been identified as having at least one victim under the age of 18, then by having at least one suspect under the age of 18.

• One crime may have multiple suspects or victims, or may have neither listed.

• Data has been presented in such a format as to avoid the application of any exemptions relevant under the act, and will not be broken down further.

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.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.