Leadership1 publisherNot yet confirmed elsewhere3 min readPublished
Lawyers take a 4.5% charge rate for image-based abuse to a police super-complaint
Research by Leigh Day and the Centre for Women's Justice has triggered a police super-complaint citing a 4.5% average charge rate for image-based abuse. Force leaders now have to decide whether to change how they handle these cases while the complaint is still under review.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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What happened
- Among the 39 forces in England and Wales whose data was examined, some charged perpetrators in fewer than 1% of image-based abuse cases last year.
- The lawyers gathered evidence from 100 people who had reported intimate images of themselves being shared online without their consent.
- Some women told researchers officers responded inappropriately, one saying an officer "almost giggled on the phone to me" and another that she was told "Boys will be boys."
- The College of Policing and the Independent Office for Police Conduct will jointly consider the complaint and decide whether to open a wider investigation.
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Why it matters
- cost Leaving survivors to collate proof and chase takedowns shifts investigative cost off force budgets onto victims; any finding against that practice moves it back onto police time.
- exposure Because the super-complaint route examines how policing operates generally, a finding would apply across forces, including those whose own charge rates sit above the average.
- decision Chief officers have to choose between changing case handling now, at a cost in officer time, and waiting for a review decision whose timing has not been published.
- constraint With the complaint arguing that new offences have not lifted charging, more legislation alone will not answer it; the test moves to what forces do with the offences they already have.
The charging data is the harder half of the evidence. The lawyers building the complaint collected the 100 accounts themselves [1], so the accounts show what went wrong in those cases and cannot show how often it happens. Home Office figures count 569 charges for image-based abuse in 2025/26 [11]. The Revenge Porn Helpline received almost 25,000 reports in 2025 [12], after referrals grew by more than 4,000% between 2015 and 2025 [4]. Side by side, the two counts give about one charge for every 44 helpline reports [17].
That ratio measures scale, and loosely. The counts cover different periods, and most survivors never go to the police at all. Researchers found that "embarrassment, shame and fear" kept them away [13]. The police-recorded charge rate, at fewer than one case in twenty [18], is the cleaner test of how forces handle the cases that do reach them.
Evidence-gathering is the practice a force controls most directly. In many cases, the research says, police left survivors to work out how to collate proof that images were spreading and how to get them taken down [14]. The investigative work moved from the force to the complainant. The people doing it are overwhelmingly women and girls, who account for 98.9% of reported images [8].
The obvious defence is that new offences take time to reach a charge sheet. The complaint addresses it directly: "Despite the increased public awareness, and the creation of new criminal offences designed to address this conduct, there has been no corresponding increase in charging rates, prosecutions or convictions," it says [10]. It also warns that advances in AI are giving abusers new ways to create and spread synthetic explicit material [9]. Helpline growth and deepfakes will play out over a decade. The decision in front of force leaders this quarter is narrower.
The super-complaint route was introduced in 2018 for ways police operate that may significantly harm the public generally, as distinct from the conduct of one force or officer [15]. Any remedy would therefore be aimed at national practice. Harriet Bland, a lawyer with the Centre for Women's Justice, said: "Without an urgent overhaul of police guidance and training on image-based abuse - which must be regularly updated - and a clear national strategy rolled out across forces, survivors will continue to be let down." [19]
The published account does not give a timetable for the decision on an investigation, or a response from any force. For a chief officer, the trade-off is between waiting for national guidance and spending officer time now on a caseload that currently produces few charges. I think taking evidence-gathering back from survivors is a change a force can make on its own authority, before any finding. If an investigation does open, I'd expect it to ask what forces did once this complaint was public.
What to watch
- Whether the College of Policing and the IOPC open a wider investigation, and how long that decision takes.
- Any force or national policing response on who gathers evidence in image-based abuse cases.
- The next Home Office charge count for image-based abuse, set against the 569 recorded in 2025/26.