Statistics on Crimes reported from the Police to the Judicial System

Problems. After an incident the victim decides whether to report to the police or not. She can also decide to report directly to the judiciary institution (Procure): in this case this incident will not be counted among those reported. The police can proceed only in case the victim formally presents her/his complaint; different is the case if a minor is involved. In this case the police has an obligation to proceed, even though the victim doesn’t present a formal complaint. This situation evidences a serious problem of comparability… there are incidents for which the penal action proceeds without formal complaints and actions which don’t. Moreover: the major difficulty is that in the penal code there’s no differentiation between the types of incident: rape, sexual abuse, sexual harassment embarrassing behaviour are all reported under a unique code: ‘violenza sessuale’. For minors this means that the police has to proceed also when the crime is not serious, and in most of the cases the judge decides to declassify it, not to proceed or if the trial proceeds the offender in most of the cases is acquitted, but data on ‘crimes reported’ remain unmodified... In hospital a women who is diagnosed as victim of rape can decide whether to report or not to the police: if she does her case enters in police statistics, if she doesn’t her case remains as a number in health statistics (if her hospital records it) but not in police statistics. This happens in most of the cases when the victim is a wife battered by the husband. The victim has 3 months to decide to present a formal complaint to the police: if she does her case will be recorded as an incident happened 3 months later then the case inserted in the hospital database: they can appear as two different cases. All these factors represent a serious problem in terms of comparability across sources and of reliability of statistics.