Child Sexual Offender Data

Al Pinkerton Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Tessa Munt (Wells and Mendip Hills) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. I have listened carefully to the debate. Child sexual abuse is one of the most despicable crimes. We absolutely need to pay attention to the victims; I pay tribute to those of you sitting in the Public Gallery today who are victims and thank you for attending. I understand that what you have heard today may well have triggered you to re-experience the things you suffered as children, and some of you, perhaps, as adults. We Liberal Democrats will support any measure that goes some way to deliver justice for the victims and prevent these horrific acts from occurring again in the future.

I was one of the seven cross-party MPs who approached Theresa May after being elected in 2010 and who spent time trying to persuade her of the merits of having the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. It took a long time to persuade her, and then it took further time to persuade her not to use the chairs she had chosen, because they were, or might have been perceived as, part of the infrastructure of the very problem we were trying to face, and that there was institutional abuse across many of our accepted centres of power.

I want to accentuate the fact that child sexual abuse is all about the abuse of power and that relationships are absolutely catastrophic when someone removes the power from an individual. There are a number of ways of removing power, and I will move straight to asking the Minister whether she would consider using some of the academic research in this field. Amnesty International has leaned quite hard on something called Biderman’s framework of coercion—Biderman spoke about it in 1957 and Amnesty International released it in 1975—which talks about the use and abuse of power and of coercive control in particular, and about the isolation of victims, the monopolisation of perspectives, the induced debility and exhaustion that victims suffer, the threats they are subject to, the occasional indulgences, or treats, that make them feel they might be special, the business of abusers—perpetrators—demonstrating omnipotence, the degradation of victims, and very often the enforcement of trivial demands just to absolutely enforce the power of the perpetrator over the victim. The perpetrators are always responsible. There is no one under the age of 16 who can consent, and many over the age of 16 cannot either. The word “rape” itself suggests there should be no consent, but no one under the age of 16 can consent anyway.

My party and I agree absolutely that we should collect data on nationality and ethnicity, and share it where it is appropriate to do so, but I draw Members’ attention to the fact that that has started to happen. I certainly have some evidence in front of me that reflects that that data is being collected. Whether it is being shared or not, I do not know, but we certainly need to make sure that the CPS, judges, magistrates, teachers and lecturers, schools generally, health staff, council staff—particularly those in adult social care and children’s social care, and housing officers—as well as the police, are absolutely required to collect data and share it. There should be compulsory training for all those in the positions that I have just listed.

Coercive control should not be viewed as something that applies only in a situation of domestic abuse. Victims of coercive control need to be heard. We need to recognise the signs of coercion and people need to be trained to recognise them.

[Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)]

A few moments ago, my hon. Friend mentioned data. The House of Commons Library has compiled some information from 2021 to 2025, which shows that the single largest ethnic group of perpetrators of child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom was white British men, who were responsible for 58.35% of all such incidents. I do not say that to reinforce points that have already been made; I do so to emphasise the second most prominent category of ethnicity, which is simply “Unknown”. That data shadow is shameful. It fails the victims of child sexual exploitation, but it also creates the space in which speculation and distrust have been allowed to flourish. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need not only to gather better data, but to robustly and systematically analyse it, in order to finally allow the truth about child sexual exploitation to be brought out into the light?

[Tessa Munt]

Absolutely. Earlier, somebody said that sunlight was the best disinfectant, and I agree absolutely.

I have here the ethnicity figures for those who have had proceedings brought against them. As I understand it, in the last five years, 989 offenders were of Asian background, which is 8% of offenders. That compares with 12,157 people of white British origin who had proceedings brought against them. Those of white British origin who were sentenced numbered 8,730; that figure was 622 for those of Asian origin.

I am not in any way decrying what has happened to anyone who has been abused, but I speak from personal experience: I declared quite openly in a previous Parliament that I was a victim of child sex abuse. It happened to me between the ages of 12 and 17. I am very lucky, because I had an enormous amount of support, both from counsellors and from my family. I am not over it, but there are ways that you can survive and thrive, and I came here in 2010 with that in the back of my head. I wanted to make sure that it came to the fore in that Parliament, and it did, but I am not finished, and that is why I am back here now.