Introduction
This week has been dominated by the government’s announcement of new policies to deal with the so-called ‘grooming gangs’. Home Secretary Suella Braverman has been forthright that the gangs were overwhelmingly made up of ethnic Pakistanis and that political correctness facilitated the crimes by preventing effective efforts to stop them. This has led to a backlash, which has focused especially on a 2020 Home Office report which said that group based child sex abusers were “most commonly” white.
The CSA Centre, a specialist research body, has recently stepped into the debate. In a thread they say their research shows that 9 in 10 of the defendants prosecuted and convicted of child sexual abuse offences in 2021-22 were white and that discussion of abuse must not be driven by “prominence in the media”, implicitly criticising the Home Secretary. But is the CSA Centre being entirely honest here?
What was the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal?
There is little dispute about the core facts of the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal: journalist Andrew Norfolk of The Times, working with whistleblowers and survivors, revealed in a series of shocking reports that mass abuse had occurred in northern towns. The abusers were overwhelmingly of Pakistani ethnicity and the victims overwhelmingly white. Inquiries spurred on by his reporting and that of others found that the abuse had occurred on an industrial scale: in Rotherham they estimated 1,400 victims over a roughly 20 year period and in Telford 1,000 victims over a similar period. In Rochdale, the follow up to an abandoned investigation had found 480 victims by 2020.
The various inquiries made clear that in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford the same profile of largely ethnically Pakistani men abusing white girls was found. All of them also found that political correctness was a major factor in preventing an effective response. In Rotherham statistics on ethnicity were taken out of presentations and council workers told by management not to discuss it. In Telford, when teachers complained that ethnic Pakistanis were abusing pupils they were told that was racist.
The baneful impact of political correctness can be seen in the case of the Labour MP Anne Cryer, who tried to raise the subject in 2003 but was repeatedly called racist in response, getting little to no help from social workers, the police, and imams. Another example is the 2004 Channel 4 documentary “Edge of the City”, which dealt with the same subject but was pulled from the schedules after anti-racist groups complained that the screening would lead to people voting BNP in the European elections that year. Despite these early attempts, it would take another decade for the problem to be taken seriously. We are now yet another decade on.
In 2020 the Home Office published a report which was supposed to examine the issue. It had been delayed for years by squeamish civil servants, fearful of the answers they might find, and on its release was hailed as having ‘proven’ that claims of Pakistani ethnic over-representation had been debunked. But the report did not do that. Instead it said that the data was too poor to be sure but that group based abusers were “most commonly” white, which means in their limited data whites didn’t even constitute a majority of abusers despite being between 85-95% of the population in the time period examined. Furthermore it had to admit that all the studies examined did show ethnic Pakistanis were over-represented (page 27, paragraph 76).
Much less media attention has been paid to an academic paper released in 2020 which used the available data and then compared it to the census to show that Muslims and especially ethnic Pakistanis “dominated” such crimes.
What is the CSA Centre and what does it say?
Among the government responses to the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal, as well as other child sex abuse scandals, was the creation in 2017 of the CSA Centre. Funded by the Home Office but based at Barnado’s, it works closely with government departments. Barnado’s has had a variety of different responses to the ‘grooming gang’ scandal. At the time it broke, CEO Martin Narey said, “This is remarkably sensitive, but it’s not something we are denying. The significant over-representation of men from ethnic minority groups, generally referred to as Asian, in this type of offending needs to be looked at”. However he was replaced soon after by Anne Marie Carrie, who admitted that ethnicity could be a factor but warned against focusing on it.
The CSA Centre has produced a range of research but the one they link to in their thread is “The scale and nature of CSA”, which is regularly updated with new data. The report quotes the Home Office report (page 62) to say that it found perpetrators who offend in groups are “predominantly from White ethnic backgrounds”. It also notes, as does the thread, that when looking at court records of those prosecuted, 92% of defendants in child sexual offences were white (4% were Asian), which would show whites being significantly over-represented (and Asians under-represented).
But how did they reach that huge figure? Frustratingly, they don’t explain. Instead the diagram to go along with this figure has a single footnote linking to a 2020 Ministry of Justice Excel file (which will download if you click that link). But there is no figure of 92% in that file, which means that the CSA Centre must have calculated the figure but not explained their working. What’s more, they admit that only 70% of the prosecuted had their ethnicity recorded at all, with the 92% figure based only on the data where it was recorded.
In fact, in some categories the number whose ethnicity wasn’t recorded is even worse than 70%. This introduces a huge margin of error and means that the 92% statistic just isn’t credible. Looking at the most recent version of that data set, in 2020 a whopping 90% of those charged with human trafficking for sexual exploitation were Asian. The remaining 10% of those charged were “non stated”, so if the CSA Centre’s method is followed and data is only used when ethnicity was recorded then it means 100% of those prosecuted were Asian. Even though the numbers prosecuted are small, this shows how easy it is to ‘game’ the data when so much of it is missing.
There are other such examples. In that same year 16% of those charged with rape of a female under 16 were Asian, compared to 49% white. The 2021 census of England and Wales showed that 9.7% of the population was Asian and 81% white. So this shows a distinct over-representation of Asians and under-representation of whites. If you do as the CSA Centre does and exclude the 30% “not stated” then the Asian proportion rises to 23%, more than double their share of the population.
When the Home Office report of 2020 confronted similar levels of missing data it used them to excuse itself from drawing a strong conclusion. In contrast, the CSA Centre report only includes some qualifications about the quality of the data and wholly ignores them in their thread. That is especially heinous when they are clearly trying to intervene in a public policy debate. Perhaps one reason why did so can be found on the Twitter account of Dr Ella Cockbain.
A longtime critic of the concept of ‘grooming gangs’, she is willing to admit there was a problem before swiftly moving on to denouncing any analysis more robust than her “anti-racist feminist” approach as Islamophobic or far-right. Some idea of the quality of her work can be found in her main paper criticising the ‘grooming gangs’ narrative, where she mentions the Jay Report, the pre-eminent examination of what happened in Rotherham, only twice: once to criticise its “methodologically dubious” estimate that 1,400 children were abused (the National Crime Agency now says the true figure is at least 1,510) and once to complain that the report led to Operation Stovewood, which by arresting abusers in Rotherham who conform to “racial stereotypes” (i.e. they are ethnically Pakistani) might “disproportionately influence public perceptions”.
Despite easy-to-find evidence that she is a bad faith actor, Dr Cockbain received the support on Twitter of one Kirsty Henderson, who describes herself in her Twitter bio as working in “Comms and Policy”. She told Dr Cockbain that she’d done a “smashing job”. Curiously there is also a Kirsty Henderson working on the CSA Centre’s Policy & Communications team, as a Communications and External Affairs Manager. This suggests that the CSA Centre’s intervention in the debate may have involved someone who supports Cockbain’s politically correct and poor quality scholarship on the issue.
Comment
As the journalist Charlie Peters has pointed out, even if Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and the other cases involving ‘grooming gangs’ had been “isolated or minority cases”, they would still be “the worst race hate crimes in 21st-century Britain” because of the sheer scale of the rapes, the obvious racial abuse of the victims, and the failure of the authorities to respond due to political correctness.
That so many in academia, the media, and third sector organisations are determined to ignore this shows how important political correctness remains to them. Even when they raise valid points, such as the role of victim blaming in allowing the scandal to occur or the dangers of focusing on only one sort of crime and missing others, they never suggest that these should be considered alongside preventing the baleful impact of political correctness or properly examining the ethnic make-up of abusers. They only want to distract attention away from realities they find unpalatable.
Similarly, there is an obsessive focus on data quality when it suggests ethnic Pakistani over-representation but that rigour disappears when the data suggests that whites are over-represented. It’s over a decade on from the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal breaking and many of the same issues are still being debated, in no small part because the Home Office and government-funded third sector organisations like the CSA Centre remain wedded to political correctness.