Contrary to the regurgitated propaganda by the far right the Home Office has found no evidence that child sex abusers and grooming gangs are disproportionately from a non white background. In fact the data suggests that the dominant characteristics are white men under the age of 30. This flies in the face of the implications proposed by those who have a far right wing agenda.
Unfortunately the government, Conservative MP’s and the corporate media amongst others have to take some responsibility for this culture of fake news being believed.
However, one of the most obvious failings from the report were the processes for collecting valid and reliable data.
The report states:
Throughout our work on group-based Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE), and in common with other forms of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA), a consistent challenge has been the paucity of data. This lack of good quality data limits what can be known about the characteristics of offenders, victims and offending behaviour, as data is only available on the small proportion of known cases. It is therefore important that the data that is available is of high quality and shared effectively between different agencies. Several factors contribute to this.
- Under-reporting – CSE, like CSA more generally, remains a hidden crime. CSA as a whole is under-reported and under-recorded, and therefore it is likely that group based CSE, as a subset of CSA, is also under-reported. Many victims cannot or do not disclose their abuse to the authorities, and nor is it identified by safeguarding professionals, so the abuse remains uncovered. A number of these findings were reflected in our conversations with law enforcement. They identified challenges to victims reporting, including victims not realising that they are in abusive relationships, victims themselves being involved in criminal activities and therefore being afraid to come forward, and victims fearing repercussions, for themselves or their families and friends, if they report.
- Definitional issues – In our work to improve the recording and collation of data on group-based child sexual exploitation, we have found that a lack of clarity around definitions of groups, gangs, and sexual exploitation contribute to inconsistencies in recording. There remains confusion amongst practitioners around what constitutes
group-based CSE. - Inconsistent practice – Even where CSE is identified, the data relating to CSE is still often inconsistently recorded. For example, research has found that information is often recorded inconsistently about victims and offenders, with different agencies focusing on different aspects when recording information. Police data in particular suffers from a lack of consistency in recording.
The home secretary, Priti Patel, herself said: “This paper demonstrates how difficult it has been to draw conclusions about the characteristics of offenders.”
The issues are certainly profound. To enable sound conclusions from the data we need accurate and well informed data. However, what we have is a politicisation of the data that leads to opinion forming and an attempt to distort to create a confirmation bias. This serves no one, least of all the offenders, and leads to conflict… constructed out of falsehoods.
We must all be vigilant no matter who the perpetrators or the victims are. To discriminate does not help those being sexually exploited and only increases racial… divisions.
Stick to the facts available. Put pressure on authority to dramatically improve data collection processes and help to understand causation. When this occurs then we can truly argue that we care about those who are being sexually abused.
Read the report in full:
Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation
Characteristics of Offending
Jason Cridland
More information: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/dec/15/child-sexual-abuse-gangs-white-men-home-office-report
For support or more information contact:
NSPCC: https://www.nspcc.org.uk/what-is-child-abuse/types-of-abuse/child-sexual-abuse/
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