Indecent exposure (FOI ref: 467/26)

Request

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I would like to request the following information regarding indecent exposure offences recorded by your force:

1. The total number of indecent exposure offences recorded since it became a criminal offence (Sexual Offences Act 2003).

2. Of these, the number of offences where the victim was recorded as female or male, if this information is held.

I would be grateful if you could provide this information in a simple electronic format (for example, Excel or CSV).

If it is not possible to provide information for the entire period, please provide as many years as you are able, starting with the most recent. For example, if the most you can provide is the last three years, please supply those.

Response

1. The total number of indecent exposure offences recorded since it became a criminal offence (Sexual Offences Act 2003).

Please see following tables but note that due to system changes/issues, we are currently only able to provide data beginning 01 January 2022:

Table 1. Exposure:

Table 2. Attempted Exposure:

2. Of these, the number of offences where the victim was recorded as female or male, if this information is held.

Please see following tables but note that the number of victims will not match the number of offences in Tables 1 and 2 above. This is for a number of different reasons depending on the circumstances of the case. Two such examples in summary are:

• Crime has occurred in a large crowd - multiple victims but no victim details recorded.
• Two individuals have urinated in public and a person has called security. So a specific individual was not approached/targeted.

Table 3. Exposure:

Table 4. Attempted Exposure:

Please note that this data should be interpreted with caution. Comparing numbers of incidents/crimes can be misleading and does not necessarily indicate the likelihood of someone being a victim of crime. In addition, the number of incidents/crimes recorded in an area over a period of time can be influenced by a number of factors. Consequently statistics on incidents/crimes for one period may not necessarily be a good indicator of future incidents in that area.

Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that this data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request may be subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting the data.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of data which has relevance 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 those data are used.  

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would 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.