And it does seem a reasonable assumption that "harassment" would outnumber the other crimes mentioned. A brief glance at other sources suggests a ratio between 3× and 10×, which is enough to drown out the headline-bait crimes, regardless of whether GP is wrong about the definition.
Section 7 is also key to statutory interpretation. 7(b) gives persuasive examples (you had not seen these and so called section 1 tautological). Morever, 7(3) means that the criminal offence only applies to repeat offenders.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1997/40/crossheading/en...
I see your 7(3) reference, but 7(b) does not exist, and none of the 7(###)(b) seems to give examples of any kind?
7(2) seems very broad though, from a layman's reading:
> References to harassing a person include alarming the person or causing the person distress.
and this alone is probably enough to cause at least some fraction of the reports to not actually meet the threshold for a conviction. So I don't see enough to prove the ancestor post "misinformation".
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Still, the actual definition is orthogonal to my point (as opposed to whatever else the top-level poster tried to make a point of), which is that statistics are still skewed to the point of uselessness by the fact that "harassment" appears to be the overwhelming majority by whatever definition is being used.
If you want to make a reasonable statistical claim about assault of either kind, this source is useless.
No it doesn't. The incident rates and under-reporting rates are all different.
Further: t's not the responsibility of the person you replied to, to provide evidence negating the original claim, which is completely unsupported and comes from someone who clearly has at best poor education on the subject and at worst is intentionally misrepresenting standards for what will be considered enough to take a report, much less investigate and attempt to prosecute.
Also because you ignored "grievous bodily harm, sexual assault, stalking, rape" to cherry pick harassment.
Also because you claim without evidence that harassment, and a very weak form of harassment, are a significant percentage of cases.
Then you leveraged the fact that most people probably do not understand the legal definitions (and statutory thresholds.)
Then you invented a definition of harassment to suit your argument and the notion that women are trying to report, and police are taking reports of, "someone staring at them on the train."
The legal definition of harassment is what matters:
https://www.local.gov.uk/definition-harassment-abuse-and-int...
Another commenter included the statutory thresholds.
From your link harassment can be the following phone calls letters emails visits
All of those seem highly subjective and are specifically relevant to my comment because they can be numerous and are very hard to track down thus leading to low solve rates.
Harassment can be literally any slight a woman (mostly) perceives. Before you downvote me consider how you can’t prosecute someone anytime they say someone is staring at them on the train.