Criminal Justice Statistics
Used as indicator
- Monitoring (trend data)
- Evaluation
Data available on
Perpetrator
Background information
- Age
- Sex
- Nationality
- ID
- Name
- Ethnicity
- Marital status
- Dependants
Incident
Incident
Representation of females and males as victims, suspects, offenders and employees in the Criminal Justice System. More specifically: Proportion of women who were victims of violence by type of violence /age; Number of violent incidents against women by violence category; Prevalence of intimate violence by category among adults aged 16 to 59; Prevalence of intimate violence in the last year among women aged 16 to 59; Gender of offender for intimate violence in the last year among women aged 16 to 59; Homicides currently recorded for all victims by relationship of victim to principal suspect; Explanatory factors associated with risk of being a victim of violence for women; Who the victim had told personally about the serious sexual assault since the age of 16; Who the victim had told personally about the serious sexual assault since the age of 16, by gender; Reasons for the victim not reporting a serious sexual assault to the police (women).
Criminal statistics on sexual violence
Criminal statistical data included
Key trends on the last twelve months (October 2011 to September 2012) of activity in the Criminal Justice System (CJS) for England and Wales, covering a range of offenses, including sexual offenses.
Characteristics
Reference period
Twelve month reference period (ending either in September or December). The first three datasets will be provisional and the year ending December statistics will be the final release of the calendar year data. As part of the final release, additional annexes will be published containing a more detailed breakdown of criminal justice statistics.
Frequency of updating
Validation
The court system data used in this bulletin goes through a variety of validation and consistency checks. Individual records are validated in an automated process that highlights irregularities and inconsistencies. In particular, checks are made, where possible, to ensure that: Offences are correct and legitimate for the age of the defendant; The sentence given for an offence is applicable in law; Hearings are consistent with the court they are heard in; and Sentences follow guidelines given the age of the offender and the offence committed. In general data validation is ongoing to investigate unusual trends or records. For serious offences (such as homicide and serious sexual offences) and severe disposals (such as life imprisonment and indeterminate sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection [IPP]) individual records are flagged for manual confirmation which further reduces the possibility of error. 9For the Crown Court, where these validation failures occur, the data are corrected by referring to original court registers. Approximately 17,000 individual records in 2011 were corrected. At the magistrates’ courts the sheer volume of courts records (around 2.8 million per year compared with 100,000 Crown Court records) means these files cannot follow the same process. The majority of validation failures are subject to automatic amendment and any serious errors are manually checked. - From April 2011 all cautions data are collected from the Police National Computer, the records are validated for accuracy and completeness and amended as necessary. Additionally any apparent cautions given for serious offences, such as rape, are investigated thoroughly with forces. All cautions data prior to April 2011 were collected directly from police forces and have been through the same validation process.
Compilation
Statistics are compiled from three main sources: Data returns submitted by individual police forces. Data extracts from court database administrative systems. Data extracts from the Police National Computer.
Quality assurance process
Validation process: The court system data used in this bulletin goes through a variety of validation and consistency checks. Individual records are validated in an automated process that highlights irregularities and inconsistencies. In particular, checks are made, where possible, to ensure that: Offences are correct and legitimate for the age of the defendant; The sentence given for an offence is applicable in law; Hearings are consistent with the court they are heard in; and Sentences follow guidelines given the age of the offender and the offence committed. In general data validation is ongoing to investigate unusual trends or records. For serious offences (such as homicide and serious sexual offences) and severe disposals (such as life imprisonment and indeterminate sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection [IPP]) individual records are flagged for manual confirmation which further reduces the possibility of error.
Accuracy
Problems. These data have been extracted from live systems used by police forces principally for operational reasons. As such, they are subject to change over time. For these reasons, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when those data are used. The data presented in this publication are drawn from administrative IT systems. Although care is taken when processing and analysing the returns, the information collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. While the figures shown have been checked as far as practicable, they should be regarded as approximate and not necessarily accurate to the last whole number shown in the tables. Where figures in the tables have been rounded to the nearest whole number, the rounded components do not always add to the totals, which are calculated and rounded independently.
Reliability
Limitations. Occasionally errors can occur in statistical processes, but procedures are constantly reviewed to minimise this risk.
Timeliness
Good. The nature of any administrative system is that data may be received late. For the purpose of this criminal justice statistics publication, the late data will be reviewed on a quarterly basis but, unless it is deemed to make significant changes to the statistics released, revisions will only be made as part of the final release containing the calendar year statistics. However should the review show that the late data has major impact on the statistics then revisions will be released as part of the subsequent publication.
Comparability
- Geographical
- Over time
- None
Current developments
Historically the recording of ethnicity data for magistrates’ courts cases has been poor with high numbers of unknown ethnic identity. After a considerable programme of work, a substantial improvement in the data were noted in the recording of ethnicity for indictable offences, with 10 per cent of convictions having an unknown ethnicity in 2011 and 2010, compared with 81 per cent in 2001. Breaches of court orders that are a criminal offence in their own right (e.g. breach of restraining order) have been included in the published tables since 2009. Prior to 2009 these were excluded from the count of court proceedings because of recording issues and are not included in the published tables.
External link
Published on the UK National Statistics publication hub (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/crime-justice/justice/criminal-justice/...)