Police officers in the UK and Welsh must collect ethnicity and nationality data in cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation. After the reviews found that the problem was “avoided”
UK Secretary of Home Affairs Yvette Cooper announced that this would become a mandatory requirement as he accepted all 12 recommendations made by Louise Casey in a group-based child sexual abuse audit on Monday.
Casey said the term “group-based child sexual exploitation” disinfected what the victims (younger 11 years old) suffered, and sanitized abused children who were impregnated with beat hits, gang rapes, and abusers, and excluded children at birth.
The perpetrators targeted girls from vulnerable backgrounds, including children in care, children with disabilities, and children who were neglected or abused.
Explore ethnicity data
The recommendation to collect target information comes after the review found a lack of data on the ethnicity of perpetrators of group-based child sexual abuse (known as “grooming gangs”) and the ethnicity of their victims.
He said this means that there is insufficient information to draw conclusions at the national level.
However, Casey found there was ample evidence in three local police sectors in Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire that there was a “disproportionate number of men from an Asian ethnic background among suspects of group-based child sexual exploitation.”
This is the case of group-based child sexual exploitation in local data surveyed, the review noted, but in the case of child sexual exploitation more widely, the ethnicity profile is much closer to that of local people.
The issue of ethnicity is the most sensitive and controversial aspect of the audit, and Cooper said he demanded that this be the focus of the analysis.
“We need far more robust national data, but we cannot move away from these discoveries, because, as Baroness Casey says, ignore the issue and don’t watch the light.
“The majority of people in the heritage communities in the UK, Asia and Pakistan continue to be attracted by these horrifying crimes and agree that disease predators and perpetrators in all communities must be addressed robustly by criminal law.”
“The hotspot has moved from the park to the steam mark.”
Like failed victims, ignoring the possible role of ethnicity factors “at the hands of groups with a divisive political agenda that does not conclusively investigate or address these issues,” Casey wrote in the review.
The assailants applied gifts and attention to vulnerable girls, handed them over to other men to rape them, and used alcohol, drugs and violence to keep them in compliance and control.
The audit said “the grooming process is likely to start online and the hotspot may have moved from the park to use hotels with steam marks and anonymous check-in facilities.”
Too often, child victims were accused of their own abuse and “criminalized for crimes committed while being groomed,” Casey said.
She recommended strengthening the law to make it clear that children under the age of 16 (the age of consent in the UK) are not allowed to receive a charge of rape, so that children can’t agree when rape is raped.
This is already the case for children under the age of 13, but she noted that cases can sometimes be removed or downgraded when children between the ages of 13 and 15 are said to be “in love” or “consent” with the perpetrator.
Among other recommendations, Casey also mandated a collection of ethnicity and nationality data in child sexual abuse cases and called for a review of criminal convictions of victims of child sexual exploitation.
Why are reviews published now?
The scandal more than a decade ago returned to the political agenda after Elon Musk made a series of social media posts about it in January. British Minister of Conservation Jess Phillips rejected a government-led request for an investigation and said it should be commissioned locally instead, then walked after it appeared.
This is a question that was previously considered, and in 2014 Professor Alexis Jay estimated that between 1997 and 2013, about 1,400 children in Rotherham were sexually exploited by men of Pakistani descent.
The report cites local government officials who explain “tension” by identifying failures by authorities and police, and by identifying “the ethnic origin of the perpetrator for fear of being racist.”
Labour initially rejected a call for another investigation, as past conservative governments had not implemented any of the recommendations made in the last national investigation.
The government succumbed to pressure in January to launch a separate national investigation, despite the victim saying they “want action” rather than another investigation.
