Offences against Children: Family Courts
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether her Department holds data on the (a) number of cases of child sexual assault brought forward at family court in the last five years and (b) proportion of those cases (i) upheld and (ii) dismissed.
Answered by Alex Davies-Jones
Sexual offences, including child sexual assault, are heard in the criminal courts. In some cases, the family courts will hear allegations of sexual abuse in public and private law cases but while this information would be recorded in case files it is not centrally recorded.
In order to provide this information, the Ministry of Justice would need to examine multiple individual case files. In 2023 for example (the last full year for which data is available) over 66,000 public and private law cases started in the family courts which involved over 104,000 children.(1)
The Ministry of Justice routinely publishes data concerning defendants dealt with at criminal courts by detailed offence codes as part of the Criminal Justice Statistics Quarterly series. The “outcome by offences” tool allows users to select offence descriptions as set out in legislation and the latest data is available to June 2024 - Criminal Justice System statistics quarterly: June 2024 - GOV.UK.
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