2022/25032 - Female Genital Mutilation Offences

REQUEST

Please provide data on the total number of offences recorded under the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 (FGM offences) and offences flagged under FGM mandatory reporting duty in your police force area for each year since 2015.

 

Please stratify mandatory reporting data by age of the alleged victim, occupation/organisation making the referral, and outcome type (e.g. charge/summons, evidential difficulties) for each available.

 

RESPONSE

Please provide data on the total number of offences recorded under the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 (FGM offences) and offences flagged under FGM mandatory reporting duty in your police force area for each year since 2015.

 

Please note that our software does not provide information for 2015 – 2017, the software only has information from 2018. Please also note that there was no recorded offences of FGM in 2020, therefore has not been included in the table below.

Please stratify mandatory reporting data by age of the alleged victim, occupation/organisation making the referral, and outcome type (e.g. charge/summons, evidential difficulties) for each available.

 

Due to low numbers recorded it is not possible to provide any further details, as this could potentially identify victims along with other information already available in the public domain. An outcome has not been included for each case as this information is not accurate due to officers needing to update this manually.

 

Section 40(2) Personal Information

 

The exemption applicable to the information you have requested for this question can be found at Section 40(2) Personal Information, of the Act and this refusal notice is issued under Section 17.

 

Gwent Police is withholding the information you have requested on the basis that the exemption contained in Section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act applies in that the information you have requested is personal data of third parties and the disclosure of the data would breach one of the principles contained in the Data Protection Act. The relevant principle is the first principle which states that:

 

Personal data shall be processed fairly and lawfully and in particular shall not be processed unless –

 

(a) at least one of the conditions in Schedule 2 is met and

 

(b) in the case of sensitive personal data, at least one of the conditions in Schedule 3 is met

 

It is only necessary to consider (a) in respect of the information requested. The relevant condition in Schedule 2 is condition 6 which states that:

 

"The processing is necessary for the purposes of legitimate interests pursued by the data controller or by the third party or parties to whom the data are disclosed, except where the processing is unwarranted in any particular case by reason of prejudice to the rights and freedoms or legitimate interests of the data subject".