Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department plans to use artificial intelligence to help (a) predict and (b) prevent incidents of (i) rape and (ii) other sexual assaults.

Rape and sexual violence are devastating crimes that can have a long-lasting impact on victims. Protecting women and girls from violence and supporting victims and survivors of sexual violence is a key priority for this Government.

The Home Office is working across government and with operational partners to develop our understanding of the threats and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence. The Home Office is also actively exploring and investigating options to use AI to both prevent and detect crime, including rape and sexual assault.

To help improve the police response to these crimes, we invested £9.4 million (2021-23) in Operation Soteria to develop a new National Operating Model for the investigation of rape. Frontline policing and academics across 19 forces were bought together to test new tools and techniques which form this new approach, and all forces in England and Wales are now implementing it.