FOI 452706

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 452706

I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 19th January 2026. Please find below the response to your request:

Clarification
Please can you provide the information for the period of 01/01/2023 to 31/12/2025. This is two full years of data.

(1) The number of suspects of relevant* child sexual offences sorted by nationality, including 'Unknown' if not linked.

(2) The number of suspects of relevant* child sexual offences sorted by ethnicity, including 'Unknown' if not linked.

*Relevant are any of the following offences:

017/14      Assault on a male child under 13 by penetration

017/16      Sexual assault on a male child under 13

019/07      Rape of a female aged under 16

019/09      Rape of a male aged under 16

019/11      Attempted rape of a female aged under 16

019/13      Attempted rape of a male aged under 16

019/16      Rape of a female child under 13 by a male

019/17      Rape of a male child under 13 by a male

019/18      Attempted rape of a female child under 13 by a male

019/19      Attempted rape of a male child under 13 by a male

020/04      Assault of a female child under 13 by penetration

020/06      Sexual assault of a female child under 13

You may consider other offences, or less offences. If that is so, please specify that in your response to ensure the figures can be reported on correctly.

For nationality, if you're not able to export per individual nationality, you could perhaps consider searching for the 'British' nationality, then providing the figure for 'British', 'Non-british' and 'Unknown'.

Reply

West Mercia Police hold the information requested.

Caveat: The search returned 1,466 unique individual suspects of 1,642 unique offences, meaning some individual suspects were linked to more than one listed child sexual offence.

(1) The number of suspects of relevant* child sexual offences sorted by nationality, including 'Unknown' if not linked.

Caveat: It is not mandatory for an individual’s nationality to be recorded and, as such, blanks are shown as ‘not recorded’ in Table 1. Nationality is not verified and recorded from information given by each subject at that given time. For some suspects, more than one nationality has been recorded in our crime management system (eg. British & English; British & Ghanaian), which could be for various reasons (eg. the individual considers themselves to have dual nationality; or the individual wishes to give different details). Because of the multiple nationalities, in Table 1, each nationality has been counted once for each suspect for each offence that they are linked to. Therefore, a suspect will appear more than once in Table 1, depending on how many times they have been a suspect (ie. suspect of multiple offences), when the offences were committed and how many nationalities have been recorded against their name on the crime recording system.

(2) The number of suspects of relevant* child sexual offences sorted by ethnicity, including 'Unknown' if not linked.

Caveat: The data in the below table is for the recorded self-defined ethnicity given by the suspects. This table totals the number of individual suspects, regardless of the number of offences they have committed. There were no multiple ethnicities recorded against an individual suspect.