FOI Ref: FOI/2022/4100
You Asked
Please supply the figures for 2020 to 2021 on hate crimes relating to social media, suicides related to social media, and children's mental health and social media.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
Hate crimes relating to social media
The Home Office are responsible for publishing data on hate crimes recorded by the police. They produce an annual report Hate Crime, England and Wales, which may be of interest to you the latest report was published in October 2021. These annual reports are available from the year ending 2014 to the year ending 2021.
For their year ending 2019 hate crime report (page 3), the Home Office did report on the difficulties of reporting the number of hate crimes flagged as online and why previous analysis had not been repeated.
It is possible the Home Office may hold more detailed information about the reporting of hate crime experienced online. They can be contacted by email at: CrimeandPoliceStats@homeoffice.gov.uk.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) publishes information regarding charges and convictions. You can contact them by email at: statistics.enquiries@justice.gov.uk.
Suicides mentioning social media
Unfortunately, we do not hold the requested information. The reason for a suicide is not a mandatory ask on a death certificate, so we would see a large undercount if we were to conduct a search for these terms on the death certificates we hold. Consequently, producing analysis on the information that we do hold would involve the creation of new information, using a high level of skill and judgement to create complex analysis in order to identify and measure the rate of missingness. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), we are not obligated to create information to respond to requests. Therefore, this information is not held.
In case its of interest, we produce an annual bulletin showing deaths by suicide. This is accessible via the following link: Annual Suicides Bulletin
We also produce provisional headline suicide data for England on a quarterly basis, with the latest update including deaths that have been registered from July to September of 2021. This is for deaths registered in 2021, and due to the registration delay described above, most of these deaths would have occurred in 2020. Suicides in England and Wales 2021 will be released in in September/October 2022.
Children's mental health and social media
Unfortunately, we do not hold information about children's mental health and social media. The National Child Mortality Database may be a better place to direct your search.