24/10/2022
Police Oracle
Last week, for just the third time, the Home Office published information on the number of police recorded offences which were identified as being ‘honour-based’ abuse (HBA),
The data has been collected by the Home Office from police forces in England and Wales on a mandatory basis since April 2019. The data are published in order to shine a light on the level of these offences dealt with by the police and to encourage other victims to come forward and report these offences to the police.
How are honour-based offences defined?
So called HBA-related crimes are formally defined in a form of words followed by both the police and the Crown Prosecution Service:
“an incident or crime involving violence, threats of violence, intimidation, coercion or abuse (including psychological, physical, sexual, financial or emotional abuse) which has or may have been committed to protect or defend the honour of an individual, family and/or community for alleged or perceived breaches of the family and/or community’s code of behaviour.”
The statistics cover offences which include crimes of forced marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM), although these two categories only make up a minority of the reported offences.
As with all police recorded crime figures, the data only cover offences that were reported to and recorded by the police. Home Office statisticians highlight the fact that HBA is a hidden crime and victims can be reluctant to bring them to the attention of police or other authorities. These statistics, therefore, are likely to only represent a small proportion of the actual HBA offences committed in year ending March 2022. In recognition of this hidden nature, the Home Office has also published, for the first time this year, the number of HBA-related incidents that have not resulted in the recording of a notifiable crime.
The statistics
In the year ending in March, there were 2,887 HBA-related offences recorded by the police in England and Wales. This was an increase of 6 per cent compared with the previous year (when there were 2,725 offences).
Increases in HBA-related offences recorded by the police over the last year are likely to be due to several reasons, including:
This was the second consecutive rise in HBA related offences, although the latest increase was lower than the previous year (6% vs 18%).
Of these 2,887 HBA offences, there were 77 offences of female genital mutilation and 141 forced marriage offences. The main HBA offences recorded were:
In addition to these 2,887 HBA offences, there were an additional 1,871 HBA-related incidents recorded by the police, but not formally recorded as a crime.
The police forces recording the highest numbers of offences in the last year were:
Conclusion
Of course the one piece of data missing from these statistics that most people would like to see is what happened next – in how many cases were perpetrators arrested, charged and successfully prosecuted and what sentences did they receive. Unfortunately, even in 2022, our criminal justice data systems are not joined up, making it almost impossible to track individual cases through