Sex Offences against Children under 18

How many reports of suspected offences against children (under 18 years) were made to your police service in the following financial years: 2004-2005, 2005-2006, 2006-2007, 2007-2008, 2008-2009? Can you separate out "possession of child pornography/incident images" from the figures and detail these separately?

For each year, please breakdown the numbers into calendar months.

Can you supply the relationship fo the person who reported the suspected offence to the alleged victim?

Can you tell us how many of these allegation resulted in successful prosecutions?

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

From our preliminary assessment, we estimate that compliance with your request would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12 of the Freedom of information Act 2000. This is currently £450.

For the five year period you are seeking information about there are approximately 300000 crime reports. To determine how many of them relate to victims under 18 years of age would probably take well over a years worth of work for one person and cost over £1M. The age of a victim is not a factor in most offences therefore its not a critical factor for recording most crimes. There are exceptions, the Sexual Offences Act is one in particular.

It would not be possible either to determine the relationship between the victim and the person reporting, its generally not a critical factor for recording crimes. The information in some instances may be contained within the MO or a crime file but again would take many hours to extract.

The results of any prosecutions are held on the person record on the Police National Computer (PNC). Again we would need to identify each person charged and trace their individual cases through information recorded on PNC.

Rather than refusing your request at this stage, I would like to explore with you how the Cheshire Constabulary may best assist you to request relevant information which we hold. We can probably supply you with the numbers of offences under the sexual offences Act, broken down by month. We could also supply the numbers of offences for possession of indecent images of children.

Would care to reconsider your request bearing in mind the above?

Please Note: Police forces in the United Kingdom are routinely required to provide crime statistics to government bodies and the recording criteria is set nationally. However, the systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the crime data. It should be noted that for these reasons this force's response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other response you may receive.