Please be aware we’re making some improvements and building a new website. You can still report incidents, tell us about general intelligence or talk to us on live chat on this site. Thanks for your patience.

Sexual Offences in Schools - 037/21

Date Responded 22 January 2021

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. In the last three years how many sexual offences were reported to you as having been committed at schools?
  2. How many of were for the offence of rape?
  3. How many were for the offence of sexual assault?

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.

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.

The results for this submission have been extracted from the central database by searches for all crimes in the time period requested which have been listed as sexual offences, wherein the Location field contains anything including the word "school" or anything including the word "classroom."

As "classroom" is a broader location that may apply to a higher education institution such as a college, a manual review of each of the cases that did not explicitly list a school as a location was required and those were discounted from the final return.

With all the above note I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows.

1. 2018 – 65
2019 – 93
2020 – 75

2. 2018 – 6
2019 – 7
2020 – 4

3. 2018 – 33
2019 – 54
2020 – 41

 

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.

back to top