Sexual assault and harassment in schools

Freedom of Information (FOI) Act request ref: 01/FIN/25/003503/X

Version Date: 13/08/2025

The Performance Analysis Department have provided the following information.

Performance Analysis (PA) have extracted from Niche all crimes with the Main Crime Group of ‘Sexual Offences’, that met the following criteria:
• Occ. Add. Common Name containing the keywords ‘school’ or ‘college’ or ‘academy’ or
• Occ. Add. Building Name containing the keywords ‘school’ or ‘college’ or ‘academy’ or
• Location Subtype as one of the following: ‘School’, ‘College’ or ‘Other (education)’
• Occ. Add. Link Classification matching ‘occurrence’

PA then ran two further queries, linking U18 suspects and U 18 victims.
In the suspects query, they added in the field for outcomes. This resulted in a nil return.

Please note that sexual harassment is not a crime of its own. PA ran a separate query to the one above, searching for crimes with the Crime Description of ‘Harassment’ as opposed to the Main Crime Group of Sexual Offences. This returned around 84 results which have been reviewed and none were sexual harassment so the sexual harassment occurrences should be in the figures below.

This data contains all occurrences containing school/college/academy in the occurrence location and does not exclude crimes that were reported to the school as happening outside of the school.

How many cases of alleged sexual assault and harassment in schools did Dorset Police respond to in 2024 (calendar year, 1st January - 31st December)?
125
 
How many of these cases were reports of under-18s harassing and assaulting their peers? i.e. instances of children sexually assaulting other children in school.
35

How many of these reports resulted in a charge?
0