Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the scale of sex grooming by organised gangs over the last 12 years; how many girls have suffered such grooming; and in which towns or areas of the UK.

Data relating to prosecutions and convictions for group-based child sexual exploitation are not held. Prosecutions for these crimes relate to a range of different offences. There is no specific offence for organised child sexual exploitation.

While we know that child sexual exploitation (CSE) happens in all parts of the country, we are continuing to build a national picture of offending. We have introduced new requirements for the police to record information relating to CSE, and have funded a network of police regional CSE coordinators and analysts, located in Regional Organised Crime Units. Alongside this, we have committed £7.5m of funding to the new Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse to identify and generate high-quality evidence on the nature and scale of these crimes.

In the year to December 2016 9,305 defendants were prosecuted for child sexual abuse-related offences (including imagery offences), a rise of 15% on the year to December 2015 (up from 8,470) and 6,763 were convicted, an increase of 15% on the number of convictions in 2015 (up from 5,879).