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I don't see a definition or threshold there other than a tautology. Can you quote one into this thread?

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.



> it does seem a reasonable assumption that "harassment" would outnumber the other crimes mentioned.

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.


OP puts up a straw man that criminal harassment is any trivial slight in the eye of the alleged victim. However, for an instance of harassment to be criminal harassment, the perpetrator must [1(b)] know their behaviour is harassment. Morever, if perpetrator is behaving reasonably, then it's not harassment [3(c)].

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.


Ah, a complete link (though including some crimes other than harassment) is:

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.




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