Home Office trashes stereotype Pakistanis behind ‘sex grooming’ gangs

LONDON: A much-anticipated Home Office report has trashed the far-right stereotype that “grooming gangs” exploiting White girls in the United Kingdom are a Pakistani and Muslim problem.

The report has concluded that there is no credible evidence that any one ethnic group is over-represented in cases of child sexual exploitation. Until now, the right wing media had linked the wide scale issue of sex exploitation with Muslim men of mainly Pakistani origin but the two-year study by the Home Office makes very clear that there are no grounds for asserting that Muslims or Pakistani men are disproportionately engaged in such crimes.

Most of the sex exploitation cases were reported in areas of Rochdale, Sheffield, Oxford and Telford where Pakistanis live in large numbers. On the contrary, the Home Office researchers have found “that group-based offenders are most commonly White”.

The myth that Pakistani Muslim men were mainly responsible for exploiting white girls started in 2011 when the Times claimed to have uncovered a new ethnic crime threat and that there is an establishment’s cover up. The same stereotype was then pushed forward by the Quilliam Foundation which claimed, with help from the right wing media, that 84pc of “grooming gang offenders” were of the Asian origin.

The report has found that the common denominator is not immigration, race, culture or Islam but that the child sexual abuse is the product of a complex interplay of patriarchy, power, exploitation, opportunity and disregard for children.

The Home Office had previously said releasing the paper would not be in the “public interest”, in response to a Freedom of Information request by The Independent, but committed to making it public after a petition signed by more than 130,000 people called on the Home Office to make the report public.

The paper said that although a number of high-profile grooming cases, including Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford mainly involved men of the Pakistani ethnicity but “links between ethnicity and this form of offending” could not be proven.

“Research has found that group-based child sexual exploitation (CSE) offenders are most commonly white," the report added.

“Some studies suggest an over-representation of black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations. However, it is not possible to conclude that this is representative of all group-based CSE offending.”

The document said there were issues with the data used in existing studies, sample selection and a “potential for bias and inaccuracies”.

“It is difficult to draw conclusions about the ethnicity of offenders as existing research is limited and data collection is poor,” the Home Office added. Evidence from police forces across the UK said that sex gangs “come from diverse backgrounds”, but that most are ethnically homogenous.

The report said that identified victims are mainly girls aged between 14 and 17, and may have vulnerabilities that create barriers to seeking help and they include being in care, learning disabilities, drug and alcohol dependency, mental health issues and previous abuse. The nationalities and ethnicities of suspects in current investigations “varied considerably”, the report said, including British, American, Bangladeshi, Bulgarian, Dutch, Eritrean, Indian, Jamaican, Lithuanian, Pakistani, Portuguese and Somali.

“This analysis demonstrated that the existing data would not answer the question of the relationship between ethnicity and child sexual exploitation,” it added. “Based on the existing evidence, and our understanding of the flaws in the existing data, it seems most likely that the ethnicity of group-based CSE offenders is in line with child sexual abuse more generally and with the general population, with the majority of offenders being white.”

The report said that efforts to combat grooming gangs should not be “limited to focusing on one particular community or culture”, although cultural characteristics and links between offenders can be relevant.

The research found no evidence of a “highly organised national network” conducting coordinated abuse in different areas, which has been suggested by far-right groups who blame Muslims or Pakistani-origin men for the abuse.

The paper warned that such abuse “can happen anywhere”, adding: “This kind of abuse can and will happen when groups of (largely) men have access to potential victims in circumstances where they feel able to act with impunity, and where the group dynamic means perpetrators both give each other ‘permission’ and spur one another on to greater depravity and harm.” The home secretary, Priti Patel, said: “Victims and survivors of group-based child sexual exploitation have told me how they were let down by the state in the name of political correctness. What happened to these children remains one of the biggest stains on our country’s conscience. This paper demonstrates how difficult it has been to draw conclusions about the characteristics of offenders.”

The Home Office said it consulted with an external reference group (ERG) of experts on child abuse in drawing up the paper.