Online hate crime statistics

Response to this request is long overdue. By law, under all circumstances, Civil Nuclear Constabulary should have responded by now (details). You can complain by requesting an internal review.

Dear Civil Nuclear Constabulary,

I am writing to make an open government request for all the information to which I am entitled under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

I am requesting this information on behalf of Amnesty International UK, to help us understand the scale of online violence in the UK. Over the past two years, we have been researching the issue of online violence against women, and are campaigning to get social media companies to improve their methods for tackling online violence. The information below will help give us an idea of how many women in the UK are reporting incidents of online violence. We are aware that the information you provide us with won’t give a complete picture, and that not all incidents of online violence will have happened via social media platforms, but this information will give us a better understanding of the context.

Please send me:

1. The number of reported online hate crimes recorded as a violence against the person offence, broken down by gender (i.e. the number of women who reported these crimes and the number of men), over the following time periods:

a. 2016-2017 (the timescale covered by the Hate Crime 2016/17 statistics)
b. 2017-2018 (the timescale covered from the last published statistics to the present)

2. We are also interested in finding out the number of reported online hate crimes (recorded as a violence against the person offence) where violence with injury was also a factor. In reading the Hate Crime Statistics report we imagine this would be recorded as either: violence with injury with online hate crime (recorded as a violence against the person offence) flagged as an aggravating factor, or vice versa.

With this information we are looking to ascertain how many reports of online violence resulted in physical violence. Again, please break this down by gender over the same time periods as above:

a. 2016-2017 (the timescale covered by the Hate Crime 2016/17 statistics)
b. 2017-2018 (the timescale covered from the last published statistics to the present)

I would like the above information to be provided to me in electronic format.

If this request is too wide or unclear, I would be grateful if you could contact me as I understand that under the Act, you are required to advise and assist requesters. If any of this information is already in the public domain, please can you direct me to it, with page references and URLs if necessary.

I would be grateful if you could confirm in writing that you have received this request.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully,
Ella Berny