Chamber and committees

The available information on crimes of rape which were recorded by the police, and on persons with a charge proved in court, where the main offence was rape, is given in the following table:Crimes of Rape Recorded by the Police and Persons with Charge Proved in Court¹, 2000

Police Force Area	Number of Offences Recorded by the Police	Number of Persons with a Charge Proved2
Scotland	562	27
Central	14	1
Dumfries and Galloway	19	2
Fife	54	0
Grampian	60	1
Lothian and Borders	119	10
Northern	15	2
Strathclyde	219	10
Tayside	62	1

Notes:1. The statistics dealing with recorded crime and court proceedings are not directly comparable as a person may be proceeded against for more than one crime involving more than one victim, or a crime may be recorded in one year and proceedings taken in a subsequent year. Charges recorded by the police may also be altered as a result of the judicial process.2. Where rape was the main offence.

I refer the member to the answer given to question S1W-25381.

Information and guidance on how to reduce the risk of drug assisted sexual assault is available through the Know The Score website and information line.We will take into account the Scottish Drugs Enforcement Agency's Strategic Assessments on the drug GHB and on Drug Assisted Sexual Assault in Scotland before guidance on these issues is published later this year.

I refer the member to the answer given to question S1W-25381.

The Scottish Executive provides a range of funding to the voluntary sector. Funding opportunities are advertised in the leaflet A Guide for the Voluntary Sector to Scottish Executive Grants. This guide is updated annually, is distributed widely throughout the voluntary sector, and is on our website. Our policies on funding the voluntary sector are set out in the Scottish Compact Good Practice Guide to Funding. Scottish Executive funding is available:

• for activities that promote Scottish Executive objectives;
• to support capacity building within organisations on the basis of agreed outputs;
• to fund core management, administrative and relevant training costs where an organisation has a continuing role in the delivery of particular policy objectives;
• for national generic infrastructure organisations and associated local networks to promote the growth and effectiveness of voluntary and community organisations, and

• on a time-limited basis, for innovative projects where the Scottish Executive has a particular interest in taking forward an experimental approach.

Applications for funding from voluntary organisations are assessed against Scottish Executive priorities and against each individual grant scheme's criteria, which are set by the Scottish Executive division responsible for each scheme. Final decisions on funding are made by ministers.

A Short Life Working Group has prepared draft guidance for health care workers on responding to domestic abuse. This guidance will be published for wide consultation in June 2002 after submission to the National Group to Address Domestic Abuse in Scotland at their next meeting on 14 May.

The group was set up to implement the recommendations in the Lord Advocate's working group's report. It has set up three sub-groups examining, respectively, support for child witnesses through the investigative and criminal justice processes, the pre-trial gathering of evidence from child witnesses, and the development of guidance on the questioning of child witnesses in court. Our recently published consultation paper on vulnerable witnesses will be very relevant to the work of the last of these sub-groups. Each sub-group is working to a particular timetable and will consult as required on its developing conclusions.Overall, the work of the implementation group should be completed early in 2003 and we will provide a further report to the Parliament at that stage.

The proposals will be considered by an assessment panel, including officials from the Scottish Executive Development, Education, and Health Departments and a voluntary sector representative, against the criteria set out in the guidance on the fund.

Indicative allocations for each local authority area were included in the guidance issued by the Scottish Executive Education Department on 30 October 2001. As indicated in that guidance, it is intended that feedback on proposals will be given in May/June 2002.

Guidance issued on the fund advised that proposals would need to show real evidence of participation by key voluntary organisations (both the larger national organisations and smaller community-based organisations) at each stage in the process. This will be one of the criteria considered in the assessment process.