FOI 19372-25 - Sexual Offences at Hospitals
Request:
1. In the years 2020 - 2021, 2021 - 2022, 2022 - 2023, 2023 - 2024, 2024 - 2025, how many police reports alleging rape and/or sexual assault on a hospital site were made?
2. Of these, how many of the alleged perpetrators worked for the NHS at the time of the offence?
3. Of these, how many of the alleged offences took place on hospital wards?
4. How many of these accusations led to a charge?
Response:
Search for all Rape and Sexual Offences from 1st January 2020 to 31st December 2025 where the Location Subtype is Hospital.
Although the location has been recorded as a hospital, this does not mean that the occurrence took place at a hospital. For example, a hospital may be recorded as the location when the true location was the road outside of the hospital. Similarly, if a crime occurred outside of hospital but was reported by someone at a hospital, the location may be recorded as the hospital from which the report was made.
Questions 2, 3 and 4 are all taken as referring to Question 1.
Question 1:
2020 – 10
2021 – 15
2022 – 7
2023 – 18
2024 – 11
Question 2: A manual review was undertaken to determine whether the suspect was likely to be an NHS worker, taking into consideration the employment type, location and crime description. Occupation is not a mandatory field and may not always be recorded. In 39 of 61 recorded offences, it was not possible to determine whether the suspect was or was likely to be an NHS worker or not. Therefore, this data is unlikely to be accurate or paint a full picture.
2020 – 2
2021 – 2
2022 – 1
2023 – 4
2024 – 3
Question 3: A manual review has been carried out to identify whether an offence took place on a ward, however in 9 cases it was not possible to determine whether the location was a ward.
2020 – 3
2021 – 7
2022 – 2
2023 – 10
2024 – 7
Question 4: To give a more complete picture, we have provided all outcome data.
|
|
2020 |
2021 |
2022 |
2023 |
2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
1: Charged |
|
|
|
1 |
1 |
|
1: Summonsed/postal requisition |
|
1 |
|
|
|
|
8: Community resolution |
|
1 |
|
|
|
|
12: Named suspect identified but is dead or too ill (physical or mental health) to prosecute |
1 |
|
|
2 |
|
|
14: Victim declines/unable to support action to identify offender |
|
2 |
1 |
1 |
2 |
|
15: Police - named suspect, victim supports but evidential difficulties |
6 |
6 |
3 |
8 |
3 |
|
16: Victim declines/withdraws support - named suspect identified |
1 |
1 |
2 |
4 |
3 |
|
18: Investigation complete no suspect identified |
2 |
4 |
1 |
2 |
2 |
The numerical data presented in this response is an unaudited snapshot of unpublished data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.
Northamptonshire Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the production of statistical information for Freedom of Information responses.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when the data is used.
If you decide to write an article/use the enclosed data, we ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.