Dating app offences

Request Number: FOI/16671

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Harassment and Stalking

Subject: Dating app offences

Request and Answer:
Your request for information below has now been considered. In respect of Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) We can confirm that the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) does hold the information you have requested however it is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and this will be further explained below. PSNI have followed the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidance ‘Requests where the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit’ in relation to this request, which also provides further detail on the application of Section 12 (1) of the FOIA. This guidance is available on the ICO website at the following link:
ico.org.uk/for-organisations/foi/guide-to-managing-an-foi-request/charging-a-fee-and-cost-limits/

Question 1
How many sexual offences or harassment offences resulting from meeting a stranger via a dating app/website were reported to your force in the past three years? Please provide one figure for reports of harassment and one for reports of sexual offences for each of the following years: 2023, 2024 and 2025.

To find these reports, please look for all those which contain at least one phrase from the following list: Tinder, Bumble, Feeld, Grindr, Plenty of Fish, Match.com, eharmony, EliteSingles, Elite Singles, Happn, Kippo, OkCupid, OK Cupid, Facebook Dating, SilverSingles, silver singles, Parship, Original Dating, Muddy Matches, Badoo, Veggly, Christian Connection, Muzz, Muzmatch, Muzzmatch, Musmatch, and JDate.

Please also look for reports that contain the phrase ‘Hinge", ‘HER", ‘Inner Circle", ‘Salt", ‘Our Time", or ‘Muzz" AND one of the following words: ‘Date", ‘dating", ‘app", ‘met", ‘match", ‘matchmaker", ‘matchmaking".

Please only include the reports in which a sexual offence or harassment offence has been reported and you can confirm that the victim and accused met on a dating app or website.

Please also include a breakdown of how many reported offences resulted from each app or website.

Question 2
How many of the victims in these reports were biological women? How many were biological men?

Question 3
What were the ages of these victims? Please split them into the following brackets: Under 16, 16 to 18, 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65+.

Question 4
Please provide me with a figure for how many of these reports resulted in charges AND, if possible, a list of the accused who went to court. From there I will get in touch with HM Courts to find out how many were convicted.

Answer
Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires the Police Service of Northern Ireland, when refusing to provide such information (because the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit) to provide you the applicant with a notice which states that fact.

It is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Section 12 of FOIA allows a public authority to refuse to deal with a request where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to either comply with the request in its entirety or confirm or deny whether the requested information is held. The estimate must be reasonable in the circumstances of the case. The ‘appropriate limit’ is currently £600 for central government and £450 for all other public authorities including PSNI. The relevant Regulations which define the appropriate limit for section 12 purposes are The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulation 2004 SI 2004 No 3244. These are known as the ‘Fees Regulations’ for brevity.

Regulation 4(3) of the Fees Regulations states that a public authority can take into account the costs it reasonably expects to incur in carrying out the following permitted activities in complying with the request:

(i) determining whether the information is held;
(ii) locating the information, or a document containing it;
(iii) retrieving the information, or a document containing it; and
(iv) extracting the information from a document containing it.

Under those regulations PSNI can calculate the time spent on each of these permitted activities at £25 per hour (thus if the activity(s) takes more than 18 hours PSNI will be in excess of the ‘appropriate limit’).

When a public authority is estimating whether the appropriate limit is likely to be exceeded, it can include the costs of complying with two or more requests if the conditions laid out in Regulation 5 of the Fees Regulations can be satisfied. Those conditions require the requests to be: 

• made by one person, or by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign; 
• made for the same or similar information; and 
• received by the public authority within any period of 60 consecutive working days. 

Regulation 5(2) of the Fees Regulations requires that the requests which are to be aggregated relate “to any extent” to the same or similar information. This is quite a wide test but public authorities should still ensure that the requests meet this requirement.

Enquiries made in relation to your request has identified that retrieval of information to respond to your request would exceed the FOI legislative cost of 18 hours as set by the Secretary of State.

The information you seek in your request is not held in a central retrievable format on PSNI database. Enquiries were made and a keyword search was carried out on the provided keywords, for the time frame requested we have identified 201 reports received. A manual trawl of every report would be required to determine which of these reports are linked to harassment and Sexual offences, once the relevant occurrences have been identified they would also need to be checked manually to determine if the victim and accused met on a dating app, what the victim’s biological gender is (if provided) the age of the victim and the outcome of the occurrence. We estimate it would take around 20 minutes to check each report, this puts your request grossly over the cost limits set out in FOIA.

In addition and for information, keyword searches are an unreliable method of collecting data from the Niche recording database because they rely on searching through unstructured data. This means that you cannot automatically determine the context of the term found in the search result and a manual review is almost always be required to decide if the result meets the criteria of the FOI request and retrieval will often exceed the appropriate cost limit.

For unstructured data fields we also cannot rely on the data having been entered in such a way as to identify those records that are relevant. Spelling mistakes, abbreviations and aliases can all affect the reliability of a keyword search.  In addition, we do not have the ability to search for keywords within external documents stored in Niche, so the scope with which we can do a keyword search is limited.

In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter should be considered as a Refusal Notice, and the request has therefore been closed. 

Advice and assistance
You may wish to submit a refined request in order that the cost of complying with your request may be facilitated within the ‘appropriate limit’. In compliance with Section 16 of the Act, we have considered how your request may be refined to bring it under the appropriate limit. Unfortunately, for the reasons as articulated on this occasion we are unable to offer you a refinement for your request.