Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Williams of Trafford on 21 December 2017 (HL4228), whether they have made any assessment of the finding of the report by Quilliam, Group Based Child Sexual Exploitation – Dissecting Grooming Gangs, published in December 2017, that 84 per cent of child sexual exploitation offenders who operate in gangs or groups are Asian, most of whom are men “of Pakistani (Muslim) origin”; what is their estimate of that percentage; and, if different, on what statistics and records they have based their estimate.

Child sexual exploitation is not exclusive to any single culture, community, race or religion. It happens in all areas of the country and can take many forms.

The Government has made significant progress in tackling child sexual exploitation as set out in its ‘Tackling CSE: Progress Report’ published in February 2017. This announced a £40m package of measures to protect children and young people from sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking, and to crack down on offenders. This includes our new £7.5 million centre of expertise on child abuse which is conducting research into offender motivations, so that we can better understand and target different forms of offending.