Offences against Children

(asked on 19th April 2023) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government on what basis the Home Secretary has associated the phenomenon of grooming gangs with ethnicity rather than with religion.


Answered by
Lord Sharpe of Epsom Portrait
Lord Sharpe of Epsom
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Home Office)
This question was answered on 3rd May 2023

We know that child sexual exploitation is not exclusive to any single culture, community, race or religion. The vast majority of British-Pakistanis are law-abiding, upstanding citizens and the Home Secretary's comments relate to the findings of local reviews into child sexual exploitation cases in Rotherham, Telford and Rochdale, which described the perpetrators in those cases as overwhelmingly British-Pakistani men.

The 2020 Home Office report on Group based Child Sexual Exploitation set out the best evidence on ethnicity, age, offender networks, the context in which these crimes are committed and implications for national and local policy. As noted within the report, beyond those specific high-profile cases, the academic literature highlights significant limitations to what can be said about links between ethnicity and group-based child sexual exploitation.

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. That is why the Prime Minister and Home Secretary have announced a number of steps to improve our data on, and our response to, group-based child sexual exploitation, including a new Taskforce, regional analysts in every police region, a new Complex and Organised Child Abuse Database hosted by the Taskforce and the roll out of the Tackling Organised Exploitation Programme, which brings together force-level, regional, and national data and intelligence.

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