Offences against Children

(asked on 14th April 2023) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what information her Department holds on the ethnic characteristics of offenders of group based child sexual exploitation.


Answered by
Sarah Dines Portrait
Sarah Dines
This question was answered on 24th April 2023

Our understanding of the child sexual abuse threat is based on police data, including recorded crime data, and is informed by independent reviews into offending in local areas and wider research. In 2020 the Government published a paper on the characteristics of group-based child exploitation offenders setting out the best evidence on how they operate, ethnicity, age, offender networks, the context in which these crimes are committed and implications for national and local policy.

We understand that it is essential for police and local authorities to have a good understanding of offender characteristics and the drivers of child sexual exploitation in their areas, so that they can uncover and tackle offending effectively. We are working closely with the police to drive up data quality and develop a better understanding of perpetrators, including through collecting higher quality data on the characteristics of offenders, including their ethnicity.

Home Office funding provides a dedicated analyst, working on child sexual abuse and exploitation, in each of the ten policing Regional Organised Crime Units based in England and Wales, and through the new Child Sexual Exploitation Police Taskforce, a Complex and Organised Child Abuse Database is being developed. This will strengthen what we know about the scale, risk and prevalence of child sexual exploitation. It will improve the collection of demographic data including ethnicity, age and relationships. Local forces will be able to draw on this information to assess the risk in their areas, and thereby better identify and disrupt grooming gangs.

Reticulating Splines