Criminal Proceedings in Scotland: 2023-2024

10. Aggravations

(Tables 12 and 13)

Please see Annex B for a note on data quality relating to the aggravations data.

Aggravation types

Aggravations are a code that can be recorded to provide additional information about a criminal charge. Some aggravations are created by legislation; these are known as statutory aggravations. These must be proved in court but can be proven by a single source of evidence rather than by corroborated evidence. For example, if someone who commits a common assault motivated by malice towards the victim’s religion, this offence would be recorded as assault with an aggravation of religious prejudice. Statutory aggravations can result in a higher penalty. Other aggravations are not created by legislation but are identifiers added for additional information. They do not need to be proved in court.

This section only reports on aggravations of domestic abuse and those against specific protected characteristics (disability, race, religion, sexual orientation and transgender).

High-level summary

In 2023-24:

• there were 11,286 aggravations recorded against a conviction
• the most common aggravation was the statutory domestic abuse aggravation (7,640)
• there were 177 people with a conviction with a statutory domestic abuse aggravation in relation to a child
• there were 750 racial aggravations, 574 sexual orientation aggravations and 256 disability aggravations

Year-on-year change

Between 2022-23 and 2023-24:

• total aggravations decreased by <1%
• statutory domestic abuse aggravations decreased by 4%
• aggravations relating to sexual orientation decreased by 3%
• aggravations relating to race increased by 6%

Change over the 10-year span

Between 2014-15 and 2023-24

• total aggravations decreased by 18%
• aggravations relating to sexual orientation increased by 79%
• aggravations relating to disability increased by 540%
• aggravations relating to race increased by 7%
• aggravations relation to religion decreased by 15%

Breakdown by offence type

In 2023-24:

• convictions with a statutory domestic abuse aggravation were most common for the crimes of Threatening and abusive behaviour (2,514), Crimes against public justice (2,206) and Common assault (1,815) (Chart 14)

Chart 14. The most common crime types with a statutory domestic abuse aggravation are Threatening and abusive behaviour, Crimes against public justice and Common assault.

Convictions in Scottish criminal courts with a domestic abuse statutory aggravation, by crime type, 2023-24.

Breakdown by sex

In 2023-24:

• males made up 87% of people with a statutory domestic abuse aggravation, down from 90% when these were introduced in 2017-18

Points to note

The introduction of the domestic abuse crime under the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 in 2019-20 may have affected the number of convictions with a domestic abuse identifier or statutory aggravation. This crime covers a course of conduct. Before the introduction of the crime, this may have resulted in multiple convictions for different offences at different times, whereas now they may result in a single conviction (with a more severe penalty). COPFS Domestic Abuse and Stalking Charges in Scotland 2023-24 statistics on the number of charges reported to them showed that the percentage of charges for stalking with a domestic abuse identifier has fallen since the introduction of the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018.

The Abusive Behaviour and Sexual Harm (Scotland) Act 2016 created a statutory aggravation of domestic abuse, which came into force on 24 April 2017, making this the seventh year data has been presented on this aggravation. The aggravation for domestic abuse in relation to a child under the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 came into effect on 1 April 2019, making this the fifth year data has been presented on this aggravation.

The statutory domestic abuse aggravation was used for the first time in 2017-18. It is never applied to a proceeding without the non-statutory identifier, but it is not applied to convictions for the domestic abuse crime under the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018. The statutory aggravation requires to be proven in court for it to apply to a conviction. The non-statutory identifier can be applied when police or COPFS believe there may be a domestic abuse element to a proceeding, but it is not appropriate to apply the statutory aggravation. This may be because the date of the offence pre-dates the legislation which introduced the statutory aggravation, or it may be because there is insufficient evidence for the statutory aggravation to be proven in court.

Please be aware that a single proceeding can have more than one aggravation recorded against it e.g. “domestic” and “disability”. In these cases, the same proceeding would be counted twice in the aggravation tables but once in the other court tables.