Sexual offences involving victims under the age of 18, 2022-2023

Request 

For Crown Court cases about sexual abuse offences involving victims under the age of 18 please could you provide the following broken down into year and CPS geographical areas:

1. For the period 1st April 2022 to 31st March 2023:
a) The number of prosecutions
b) The number of convictions and non-convictions including a breakdown of reasons for non-conviction (such as prosecution dropped, acquitted/dismissed after trial, discharged or others)
c) The number cases the CPS decided to charge
d) The average number of days from the charge decision to finalisation

Please be aware that we understand that some of this data is made publicly available via the Ministry of Justice but cases are not broken down into all child victims under the age of 18 as it does not include young people over 16-years-old.

Response

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does hold limited data within the scope of your request pertaining to 2022. Please note that January to March 2023 data will be released in July 2023 in line with our publication policy and so is not included within the disclosed data.

Please find attach for your reference an Excel spreadsheet labelled 'FoI Request 11331 Data'. The data sets provided concern prosecutions where we have applied a child abuse ‘flag’ to the case, where the principal offence category is ‘sexual offences’. The child abuse flag is applied when the victim is under 18 years of age. The caveats appended to that data should also be noted when considering the disclosed information.