Domestic Violence Incidents

1. How many incidents of domestic violence were reported to your police force from 1st April 2009 to 31st March 2010?
2. How many of these incidents involved victims who were pregnant at the time?
3. How many of these incidents were witnessed by children and what were their ages?
4. How many of these incidents involved a child being injured and if so what were their ages?
5. How many of the incidents involving pregnant women or children aged under one were reported by your police force to health or social services?

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. 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.

The basis for this estimate is the requirement to manually examine the relevant records of which there are some 5660 initial reports of 'domestic abuse' during the period in question, to ascertain if any record contains the information you have requested.

Those initial reports will in all probability translate into fewer actual incidents but never the less this will still be a considerable number in the thousands. Having carried out some trials on the relevant database I can say that without a manual examination we could not retrieve any relevant data.

Unfortunately I am unable to advise a way of refining your request to achieve any meaningful statistics within the FOI cost limits in relation to the majority of your questions. We can provide the numbers of domestic violence incidents for the period in question but without further breakdown.