Breakdown of people committed violent crime past 10 years: FOI release

Information requested

1. The number of people who were charged and/or convicted of violent crime(s) in Scotland in the last 10 years, broken down by crime sub-type(s) and the gender of the offender. If possible, please provide the option to break this data down according to offender's ethnic backgrounds.

2. The number of people charged and/or convicted of domestic and/or partner abuse in Scotland over the past 10 years, broken down by sub-type(s) of abuse, and the gender of the offender.

3. The number of people who were recorded as being victims of sexual violence in Scotland over the last 10 years. If possible, it would be helpful if this data could be broken up by their gender.

Response

I attach a copy of most of the information you requested in an excel workbook.

The latest available information from the Scottish Government (SG) Criminal Proceedings database is for the financial year 2020-21 whereas the Recorded Crime data covers the period 2012-13 to 2021-22. Please note that data from 2020-21 are affected by the pandemic and subsequent court closures and should not be considered indicative of long term trends.

Care should be taken when comparing different data sources relating to the criminal justice system and we would direct you to section C14 of the criminal proceedings bulletin for further explanation, available here: Criminal Proceedings in Scotland, 2020-21 (www.gov.scot).

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested.

Questions 1 and 2: . The SG criminal proceedings database does not contain information relating to either the number of charges reported to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) or to the ethnicity of a person. We have provided you with the numbers of people prosecuted and convicted and trust this will be sufficient for your purpose.

However, you may wish to contact COPFS at foi@copfs.gov.uk who may be able to help you with the 'numbers of charges reported' to them by Police Scotland.

Question 3: We don’t hold data on the number of people recorded as being victims of sexual violence, however we are able to provide data on the number of recorded sexual crimes from police recorded crime statistics. Police recorded crime data is provided as a count of recorded crimes. For cases of Rape and Sexual assault, each crime will have one victim, however each victim may have more than one crime committed against them.

As there is no agreed definition of sexual violence, we have provided data on all crimes in the sexual crimes group. This is provided in table 1. For full definitions of each crime, please see the Scottish crime recording standard: crime recording and counting rules - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

From table 1 it can be seen that in 2021-22 there were a total of 15,049 sexual crimes. Of these 15,049 crimes 6,779 are recorded against crime codes which disaggregated by male or female victim. Of these 6,779 crimes, 670 were sexual crimes with a male victim and 6,109 were sexual crimes with a female victim. The extent to which categories of sexual crime can be disaggregated between male and female victims is detailed below.

You may also be interested to note that crimes under the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 are also split by gender and are available in Table A2 of Recorded Crime in Scotland, 2021-2022 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot). Although note that as this is a course of conduct offence, any crimes which occur as part of this course of conduct will also be recorded in addition to this crime.

It is important to note that all crimes are recorded on the date reported, not the date occurred. We know that 23% of sexual crimes in 2021-22 were recorded at least one year after they occurred. The use of specific crime codes to record sexual crime also highlights where these cases are historical.

Disaggregation of categories of sexual crime between male and female victims

Rape and attempted rape
The majority of crimes in the rape and attempted rape category (88% in 2021/22) are disaggregated by whether the victim was male or female. The only crime code which does not specify whether the victim is male or female (Rape) is only applied

Sexual Assault
The majority of crimes in the sexual assault category (80% in 2021/22) are disaggregated by whether the victim was male or female. The crime codes which do not specify whether the victim was male or female (Sexual Assault and Lewd and Libidinous practices) are only applied to crimes which occurred prior to 1 December 2010.

Causing to view sexual activity or images
Communicating indecently
Threatening to or disclosing intimate images
Indecent photos of children
Crimes associated with prostitution

None of the crimes in the above categories have any information on whether the victim was male or female.

Other sexual crimes
Around 20% of Other sexual crimes reported in 2021/22 were disaggregated by whether the victim was male or female. Please note the crimes which fall in this category and have a specified gender attached to them, almost all pertain to consensual sexual activity, so may not come under the sexual violence definition.

This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have some
of the information you have requested.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

FOI 202200329665 - Information released

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Excel document

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