FOI 5673-25 Street Harrassment, Victim and Perpetrator Gender
Request to Northamptonshire Police
Please could you confirm:
a) How many incidents of street harassment were reported to your force in the years 2020,
2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 respectively;
b) How many of the alleged victims for each year were male and how many were female;
c) How many of the alleged perpetrators for each year were male and how many were
female.
Response
Following receipt of your request searches were conducted within Northamptonshire Police to locate information relevant to your request. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held.
However, Northamptonshire Police are unable to provide you with the information requested because it is not held in an easily retrievable format. As ‘Street Harassment’ is not a standalone offence, compliance with your request would require our analysts to manually review 10,816 records. By way of explanation, we would need to search offences which fall into the following categories: -
Cat Calling and Wolf Whistling
Exposure
Following, persistent following, cornering, isolating
Kerb Crawling
Leering or persistent staring
Physical assault that has a sexual or gender-based element
Sexual Assault
Sexual Gestures
Sexual Propositioning, sexually explicit comments, intrusive persistent questioning
Sexual Touching
Upskirting
Viewing pornography in public
Voyeurism
We estimate this would take a minimum of 3 minutes per record which would exceed the appropriate cost limit of £450.
Accordingly, please accept this Refusal Notice under s12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (The Act).
We always strive to provide the highest level of service that we can with the finite resources at our disposal. Due to the large number of files which would need to be reviewed, we cannot offer advice and assistance to help you revise your request as outlined in s16 of The Act. Even providing one years’ worth of data under the scope of your request will exceed the appropriate cost limit of £450.
Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason, responses between forces may differ and should not be used for comparative purposes.