Statement on Police Scotland recording policy U-turn

A letter from Police Scotland has just been published by the Scottish Parliament’s Criminal Justice Committee. It states: ‘The Committee should be absolutely assured that a man who commits rape or serious sexual assaults will be recorded as a male’

This is a major U-turn by Police Scotland. We welcome that Police Scotland has at last recognised that allowing sex offenders to self-identify their sex is indefensible. It is, however, an extraordinary act of institutional gaslighting to pretend that this is not a significant policy change from their position over almost five years. Over that period, Police Scotland has persistently and vigorously defended the use of self-ID for recording the sex of all offenders, including sex offenders, as being in line with its “values”. For example, in 2021, we were told:

If the male who self-identifies as a woman were to attempt to or to penetrate the vagina, anus or mouth of a victim with their penis, Police Scotland would record this as attempted rape or rape and the male who self-identifies as a woman would be expected to be recorded as a female on relevant police systems.

In 2023 Police Scotland told the Scottish Parliament’s Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee:

A woman may be recorded as having committed rape in the following scenarios: …. Where a person born male, obtains a full gender recognition certificate and then commits rape (providing they have a penis) [or] If the attending officer is satisfied the individual presents as a female and subsequently records them as such on our crime systems which, if the offender is a first time offender and having a new record created on Crime History System (CHS), will be created as female….

We have always maintained that only a small number of rapes being misclassified as having been committed by women would skew data on female offending. The policy is also deeply offensive to victims. Police Scotland state ‘There is no instance or record on police systems of a male having been arrested and charged with rape whose gender has been recorded as female. This has not happened’. This misses the point, which is that Police Scotland had a policy in place which would have permitted this, and is known to have had a number of near-misses. For example, double rapist Isla Bryson/Adam Graham was not recorded as female only because he changed identification while awaiting trial. We have been given to understand that Police Scotland has discussed the possibility of recording Bryson as female once released and under supervision. Serious sex offender Andrew Miller/Amy George is on record as having chosen to be recorded as male; but under the previous policy, had he identified as a woman, he would have been recorded as one. It remains unclear how the serious sex offender known as Katie Dolatowski has been recorded. These are only the best known incidents.

We now need urgent reassurance that this major change has been written clearly into operational policies and communicated right across the service. We also need clarification about what sort of offenders Police Scotland still believes do not need their sex to be accurately recorded, and why.