Physical Abuse on Children

1. How many incidents of physical abuse on children was reported in FY 2006/7 in your police force area?
2. How many arrests were conducted on people who had physically abused children in FY 2006/7 in your police force area?
3. How many incidents of physical abuse on children was reported in FY 2007/8 in your police force area?
4. How many arrests were conducted on people who had physically abused children in FY 2007/8 in your police force area?
5. How many incidents of physical abuse on children was reported in 2008/9 in your police force area?
6. How many arrests were conducted on people who had physically abused children in FY 2008/9 in your police force area?

Clarification

You may need this additional information to proceed with my request:

The age range is children under the age of 16

Physical abuse I refer to assaults occasioning actual bodily harm (violent crime- hitting, punching and sexual offences..)

In accordance with section 1 (1) (b) of the Act our response is provided below;

Question 1

2687

Question 3

2286

Question 5

1841

Please note:

A crime has only been included where the age of the victim at the time of the offence is known (Victim D.O.B is not a mandatory field). There were almost 2500 blank age fields across the 3 years. For this reason, the statistics provided are only an approximation.

There were some difficulties in using the age field due to the nature of some of the offences. For example, some sexual offences against children may span over a long time period. I.e. the occurred dates may be from 1993 to 2000 but only 1993 would be used to calculate the person's age at the time of the offence.

In relation to questions 2, 4 and 6

We are unable to link the age of a victim to an offender's custody record, therefore to obtain this information we would need to manually scrutinise each record to look at the ages and this is estimated to exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit is defined in the Data Protection and Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004, which is covered by statutory Instrument Number 3244 of 2004. Furthermore, section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 allows a public authority to refuse to respond to a request for information where the cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit as defined by the above mentioned regulations.