Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the conviction rate was for child abuse offences for (a) white British and (b) British Pakistani people in each of the last five years.

The Ministry of Justice publishes information on prosecutions, convictions and sentence outcomes in the Outcomes by Offence data tool: December 2022 including offences as set out in the Offence Group Classification. This includes filters for defendant demographics such as ethnicity and age.

However, child abuse offences are not specifically defined in legislation and could include a wide range of offences relating to physical, emotional, or neglectful abuse. Whether an offence was committed against a child may be held on court records but to examine individual court records would be of disproportionate costs.

Further, although the Outcomes by Offence data tool: December 2022 can be filtered to detailed ethnicity based on the 18+1 ethnicity classification, it is not possible to disaggregate defendants of British Pakistani ethnicity from British Asian ethnicity in the data.