Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate he has made of the number of (a) arrests, (b) prosecutions and (c) convictions for child sexual abuse offences perpetrated on the dark web in each year since 2014.

The Home Office does not hold centrally the information requested.

The Home Office collects and publishes data on the number of arrests for notifiable offences on a financial year basis. The Home Office collects and publishes these data at the offence group level, for example, ‘Sexual offences’ or ‘Miscellaneous crimes against society’. More detailed information on the specific offence for which an individual is arrested, or the location where the offence was committed, is not collected.

Data on the number of arrests are published in the ‘Police Powers and Procedures, England and Wales’ statistical bulletin, which can be accessed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/police-powers-and-procedures-england-and-wales

Coordinated activity by the NCA and UK policing against online child sexual abuse and exploitation resulted in 4638 arrests made in 2017; and 4374 arrests in 2016. Data is not available for preceding years, and is not broken down between offending on the dark web and open web.

Information on prosecutions and convictions is the responsibility of the Ministry of Justice.