Defining and Registering Criminal Offences and Measures - Oapen

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Bodily Injury (Assault)
The results of the trial phase showed that the definition worked quite well in
all countries. In general, all countries were able to include all items on the include
list in police data and convictions data. The only exception to this was minor bodily
injury in France, which is not included in police statistics and only partially
included in conviction statistics, i.e. only when they are 5th class contraventions.
Violence without temporary work incapacity (no injury) and without aggravating
circumstances is a 4th class contravention, excluded from conviction statistics in
France.
Compared with the “include”-rules, countries had much more difficulties to
follow the “exclude”-rules: On the one hand, four out of eight countries on police
and five out of nine countries on convictions level stated that they included assault
leading to death. On the other hand, four countries included at least some of the
minor forms of assault without actual injury that should be excluded according to
the definition. Assault only causing pain, slapping and punching are included in
Finland, Germany, Poland and UK: England and Wales. The latter two countries also
included threats.
Finally, Finland and Poland even included sexual assault in their data.
One reason to try to record separate data on aggravated assault was that this
category should be more comparable between countries, since it should be less
influenced by the varying wideness of the national assault definitions. However, as
results show, inclusion/exclusion of assault leading to death is a problem here,
still. But apart from that, definitions between countries seem to be more comparable,
as most parts of the include/exclude rules were quite strictly followed by all
countries. There are only exceptions for an especially vulnerable victim as an aggravating
circumstance – this is not considered aggravating in Finland and Germany.
Apart from this, in Poland, threats and sexual assault are even included in the aggravated
cases.
Data availability for assault was very good. All responding countries were able
to provide data on assaults on police and convictions level. The situation is a bit
different for aggravated assault, where only half of the responding countries were
able to provide data during the trial phase. On the other hand, data availability for
aggravated assault was good on convictions level, where of the responding countries
only France was not able to provide separate data.