Preventing ‘Grooming Gangs’ Requires Honest Data 

We need to talk about the failure to collect and provide data about the offenders connected to the grooming gangs—or what is more accurately described as child sexual slavery and enforced child trafficking. 

Despite having signed and ratified the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (‘the Istanbul Convention’) which, in article 11, requires the UK authorities to collect and make public such data, we have an intelligence picture that is so bad it suggests the truth is being deliberately obscured to hide the true scale and nature of these horrors.

As highlighted by Baroness Casey’s report of 16 June 2025, ‘the system has consistently failed to … collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively… [i]nstead flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs” as sensationalised, biased or untrue.’

It should not have taken Baroness Casey’s review to highlight this. Any intelligence professional worth their salt will tell you it is fundamental to tactical and strategic doctrine to understand the threat before acting. Given estimates of 250,000-1,000,000 children may have been targeted over several decades, this scandal undeniably represents the greatest domestic intelligence failure in our nation’s history.

Every year the Ministry of Justice releases criminal justice statistics. Unfortunately, they are inherently misleading. In 2010, the ethnicity of offenders was recorded 94% of the time for potentially relevant offences. Each year this number was reduced and by, 2023 ethnicity was only recorded in 67% of cases. The result? The data is meaningless and no professional intelligencer would allow confident assessments to be made. Baroness Casey said as much.

This has not stopped organisations like The Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, incidentally funded by the Home Office, from producing glossy yearly reports—including the 2023 edition that stated 90% of offenders were white—which then do the rounds to obfuscate and deny the scale and scope of abuse: see former MP Lucy Allan’s comments about Baroness Saida Warsi’s orders to bury the scandal. 

There are two fundamental issues with using this data: The first is that the raft of relevant offences, e.g., rape of a child under 13, could apply to child sexual abuse in any setting, which prevents any understanding of how many instances of child sexual slavery and enforced child trafficking occur and which ethnicities, if any, are over-represented.

The second is that, even if there were relevant offences, there appears to have been a deliberate policy shift to not collect ethnicity data—if not outright manipulation— and, even in the event that a particular offence could be identified, no confident assessments could be made. It is suspected that this stems from misguided legal counsel interpreting Section 149 of the Equality Act 2010—the implementation of which coincided with the sharp decline in ethnicity data collection—which requires the public sector to ‘foster good relations’ between different races, including the need to ‘tackle prejudice’.

Even the Police’s new ‘Hydrant Programme’s’ approach to data is bizarrely inept. Any remotely professional operation tasked with tackling and understanding this behaviour would have put data collection at its core as part of its intelligence function. Yet on June 3rd, 2025, we found out that only 31% of suspects had their ethnicity recorded. Despite this, Deputy Chief Constable Becky Riggs, who is, we were told, the police lead on grooming in England and Wales, went on BBC Newsnight telling the nation that ‘we can only go with the data’ and that it was ‘not true’ that these crimes were being committed by predominantly British Pakistani men. Even though Pakistani men were massively over-represented in that data, it was wrong of her to make her statement. The correct thing for her to say was ‘We simply cannot know because we are not collecting enough data’ and then to promise on national television to collect the data.

In addition to ethnicity, there is a complete lack of recording of religion. People often talk of Pakistanis, which is correct because they are over-represented in this appalling phenomenon, but the truth of the matter is that there have been cases of Somalis, Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, and even a Jordanian. The common factor amongst the perpetrators is not nationality or ethnicity but Islam, and the common factor amongst the victims is that they are non-Muslims. It is therefore imperative, and aligns with authorities’ duties under the Istanbul Convention, to collect data about perpetrators’ religions as well as their ethnicities. It is imperative to understand the moral construct under which these men operate if we are to have any chance of preventing these heinous crimes.

The gross irony is that when someone is successfully prosecuted, information about their ethnicity and religion is almost always recorded—either through the evidence presented during the trial or in the pre-sentencing report that is typically submitted to the court before sentencing. So this data could, in reality, be published in short order if there was political will and a relatively small amount of funding: artificial intelligence could be deployed to retrospectively gather the data.

Even if it weren’t, a ministerial flick of the pen could make it policy going forward the very next day. That is literally all it would take. Every police officer, prosecutor, court officer, and judge could be compelled to record the ethnicity and religion of suspects.

All of this suggests one of three possibilities: the government and authorities have either deliberately avoided collecting the data, manipulated it, or been grossly negligent. Whatever the case may be, the result is that victims will continue to be let down as authorities fail to target the threat through an intelligence-led approach. Instead, the tired path of hiding behind deliberately incomplete data and perverting the course of justice by obfuscating and branding survivors and their advocates as racists will continue.

But there is a glimmer of hope. In her report, Baroness Casey recommended that the government “make mandatory the collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases and work with the police to improve the collection of ethnicity data for victims.” This sounds positive—but there are three immediate issues:

• In response, the government only promised to make it a requirement for the police. In isolation, this is the wrong approach. Notwithstanding well-founded allegations of manifest corruption, it is those who update the court systems for whom it must be made a mandatory requirement. This means the directive must also be in force for the Crown Prosecution Service and the Ministry of Justice.
• The recording of nationality and ethnicity is a step in the right direction but neither one’s passport nor the colour of one’s skin equals a propensity for committing atrocities. Saying so is simply racism. The truth is there is an ideology at the core of this which must be scrutinised—and it starts with a fuller intelligence picture, including religion. If nothing else, we must sympathise with our fellow Brits of Indian extraction who, frankly, must be sick to death of being lumped in with these ‘Asian’ sex-slavers.
• There must be a new offence of child sexual slavery and enforced child prostitution. This is the true offence of which these criminals are guilty. At the moment, perpetrators are convicted of a range of offences, from ‘rape of a child under 13’ to ‘using an instrument with intent to procure a miscarriage’ but these despicable acts occur in a number of obviously irrelevant settings. What we are seeing with the ‘grooming gangs,’ time and time again, decade after decade, is child sexual slavery and enforced child prostitution. This is recognised as a ‘crime against humanity’ by the British government when it occurs abroad, so why does domestic law not expressly recognise this evil?

It is therefore imperative that the new statutory inquiry be closely held to account and all relevant legal levers deployed by survivors and their advocates to ensure it is targeted, intelligence-led, delivers meaningful outcomes for victims, and prevents this evil from continuing. In addition to ensuring the voices of victims are heard, that is exactly what the team at the National Archive for the Survivors of Grooming Gangs intends to help do.