Child Abduction and Kidnapping Data 2024/25

Request

1. From 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025, how many crimes of child abduction by a parent (Home Office classification 13/01) were recorded in South Yorkshire Police?

2. From 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025, how many crimes of child abduction by other persons (Home Office classification 13/02) were recorded in South Yorkshire Police?

3. From 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025, how many crimes of kidnapping (Home Office classification 36/01) – when the victim was aged under 18 at the time of the offence – were recorded in South Yorkshire Police? Please note: I only want to collect data on 36/01 offences; not the other 36 sub-categories (36/02, 36/03, 36/04 etc.).

4. For each of these three figures (questions 1, 2 and 3 above) please can you indicate how many of the offences were flagged as Child Sexual Abuse, and how many were flagged as Child Sexual Exploitation.

Response

Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires South Yorkshire Police, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt), to provide you the applicant with a notice which:

1. states that fact,
2. specifies the exemption in question and
3. states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.

The following exemptions apply to the disclosure of the information:

Questions 1 and 4

Exemption applied - Section 40(2) Personal Information

This is an absolute exemption and therefore a Public Interest Test is not relevant.

Reasons for applying exemption 40(2)

Section 40(2) provides that information is exempt if it is the personal data of someone other than the applicant and disclosure would breach any of the data protection principles. The term 'personal data' means data that relates to a living individual who can be identified. This may take an obvious form of 'personal information' such as a name but can also include information which, if aggregated, can pinpoint an individual. Due to the request for data for a specific offence, in a short time parameter and the low numbers involved to release the number of crimes of child abduction by a parent and how many offences were flagged as Child Sexual Abuse and Child Sexual Exploitation may potentially identify individuals involved and would breach data protection principles.

Question 2

24

Question 3

11

South Yorkshire Police can neither confirm nor deny that any further information is held relevant to your request as the duty in Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 does not apply by virtue of the following exemption:

Section 23(5) Information supplied by or concerning certain Security Bodies.

Section 23 is a class based absolute exemption and there is no requirement to consider the public interest in this case.

Confirming or denying the existence of whether any other information is held would contravene the constrictions laid out within Section 23 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 in that this stipulates a generic bar on disclosure of any information applied by, or concerning, certain Security Bodies.

Of course, no inference can be drawn from these facts that any information does or does not exist.