Most child sexual abuse gangs made up of white men - Home Office report

[stumbledin]

Study of England, Scotland and Wales dispels myth of ‘Asian grooming gangs’ popularised by far right

The majority of child sexual abuse gangs are made up of white men under the age of 30, an official paper has said.

It found that while offenders come from diverse backgrounds, groups tended to be of men of the same ethnicities. Money and sex were motivations as well as a sexual interest in children and misogyny, the review said.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/dec/15/child-sexual-abuse-gangs-white-men-home-office-report

The modes of operation are different though and it's important to understand that and other factors in order to safeguard/ prevent.

The important thing is the victims, and stamping this out. In order to do that you need to understand the characteristics of the men doing it and how they are getting hold of their victims.

The way the grooming gangs in eg Rotherham operate and who they target etc is not the same as other groups who have different pools of victims and different types of power over them.

Op i don't think anyone thinks it is only one group that do
This sort of thing , i have never heard anyone actually say that

Op you are also aware that women can be sex offenders and that many men are not

The fact that ethnicity isn't accurately or reliably recorded I find difficult to believe, every single official form I complete has a part to record my race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality sometimes. The data will be there, even a list of names and the police photographs would provide the data. These are crimes, that is public record stuff, they just don't want to look for it because they want to know the facts, just deny that there was ever a problem.

The issue of information being not accurate or reliably reported generally means that it doesn't sit in a single data source from which it can be easily extracted. This is then, of course, used as an excuse to not capture the data when writing something like the Home Office report, either because people decide that it's too much work, or that they are wary of the conclusions they would be forced to draw should they collate the data in one place.

(Earlier today I was working on some material provided to me by the police on an Excel spreadsheet. Quality and consistency was terrible, but I'm collecting what I need from other sources because that's what you do when you actually want to find some conclusions.)

I'm fairly unimpressed with the Home Office report here; it's relatively vague, and doesn't go into the kind of detail you would require if you wanted to, firstly, accurately define the problem and, secondly, to attempt to formulate a response. Even as an overview it's pretty useless.

No one is saying that Asian grooming gangs do not exist, but all the evidence suggests that these gangs can be of any ethnicity. Pointing out facts doesn't belittle the suffering of victims, in fact the opposite - the racists on this board screaming about evil Asians are actually doing genuine harm to girls who have been victim to sexual abuse and grooming by grooming gangs comprised entirely of white men. Most sexual abuse and sexual grooming is committed by white men, by pushing the racist lie that it's primarily committed by Asian men you lessen the chance that victims of white groomers will be believed, lessen the chance they will be taken seriously

Are you drunk? Did you actually read any of the comments?
Why are you assuming everyone who posts is white? Bit racist.
No one is " screaming" about " evil Asians" ..
Some of us are related to "Asians". Some of us come from towns where groups of taxi drivers groom and traffic vulnerable girls.
Not a single person said that grooming gangs are primarily Asian. Or that perverts and rapsists are never white. What many said was that when grooming DID happen, and the perpetrators were Asian , and the victims were thought of as worthless slags, the authorities- the establishment who should have been safeguarding those children- were toothless and afraid to tackle it. That's a fact. You sound like a uni student with zero experience if the realities of life, let alone the realities of the suffering of abused girls.

I would like to see, for example, the number of people that make it considered a gang - 2? 3? 10?

According to the report:

" Groups are two or more people of any age,"

"For the avoidance of doubt, our work has focused on child sexual exploitation perpetrated by groups, as per the above definition"

If they are including all cases where two men may have collaborated in some way, this may explain the "whiteness" of the perps, as this will sweep in a very wide number and range of crimes and the UK is an 85% white country.

I've seen 50 MN threads that happened to involve a Muslim person or a Muslim issue get derailed into "but Muslims are evil because they sexually groom children and LIBERAL SNOWFLAKES cover it up because they don't want to be accused of being racist!!111!"

I really wonder what threads you've been reading.

I worked as a social worker in child protection in Yorkshire during the Rotherham era.
The grooming and abuse of young and vulnerable girls was known but denied by LA at management level solely because of the race issue.
Multi agency, multi council meetings were shut down due to fear of the impact on race relations despite a lot of concerned professionals turning up for them.
Asian men were not solely abusing white girls, they were also abusing girls in their communities as well.
But a fear of race tensions did lead to a different response to standard child protection responses.
Having said them the concept that 12/13 year olds could consent to sexual relationships with much older men because they were those sorts of girls wasn't new and was about misogyny.
Asian men aren't the only men abusing girls but they are part of the problem.

Just to be clear the Asian grooming gangs in South Yorkshire were well known to Professionals.
I was also impressed by the concern shown by the local police at the time.
It was Local Authority senior management who were most scared of leaning into the issue.
I wasn't in Rotherham but a concerned adjacent LA.

I think class is a huge factor here too. Rotherham, Halifax, Keighley, Blackburn, Burnley etc have high levels of unemployment and poverty, in traditional working class towns.

This is a huge factor. Teamed with insular communities it's not surprising that such abuse occurs.

It's not that long ago there were race riots - Stoops Estate, Frouby? Fancy a night there?

Thought not. Due to these racial tensions it's easier to brush abuse under the carpet - it becomes a racist issue, rather than a child abuse one.

I've lived through this - I went to school in East Lancashire and all the white girls were heckled daily by Pakistani/Bangladeshi boys - white bitch, etc etc. Tell the teacher? They can't do anything - it's racist.

That's where it starts.

You can't compare this situation with others. The socio-economic factors are too different.

I tell people this and they say I'm racist....

The treatment of the victims by the authorities seems to be the same across the board which needs attention of its own.

I thought it had been established that there had been a particular problem with reluctance to investigate in the Rotheram cases because of the race of the gang(s) involved, lest the police be seen as racist.

I think that's the main "trope" here, even among the right-wing. It's not so much the race that's at issue, it's the belief that authorities are not doing their job properly, as they care more about not being seen as racist than whether any girls are being abused.

And this sort of report just feeds into that belief - it looks like a desperate attempt to "not be racist" by fudging figures and saying "well, offenders are mainly white" (in a mainly white country, doh).

That's akin to the claim "there are more cis women sex offenders than trans women" that I've seen. Even if true (not sure that it is - last I saw the total was roughly equal) that just means that "trans women" are somewhere under 1000 times the risk, given the population makeup. There should almost no "trans women" sex offenders in the UK given the population count, if they're the same risk profile as women... (Compare the reality that there are almost no murdered "trans women" in the UK).

LIBERAL SNOWFLAKES cover it up because they don't want to be accused of being racist!!111!"

That basically is what happened in Rotherham though. An Inquiry found this to be true in Rotherham Council. Pointing that fact out isn't racist. Those girls were utterly failed by people in authority.

The modes of operation are different though and it's important to understand that and other factors in order to safeguard/ prevent.

The important thing is the victims, and stamping this out. In order to do that you need to understand the characteristics of the men doing it and how they are getting hold of their victims.

The way the grooming gangs in eg Rotherham operate and who they target etc is not the same as other groups who have different pools of victims and different types of power over them.

This. As Lang would say, no sacred castes when it comes to safeguarding.

Dozens of so called "grooming gangs" have been convicted across West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and Lancashire but the report does not include these areas. Why is that?

Because what's happening in towns in these counties with many convictions, some towns with multiple gang convictions, is still being covered up. Towns like
Rotherham, Rochdale, Keighley, Bradford, Huddersfield, Dewsbury, Halifax, Blackburn, Burnley, Sheffield, Manchester, Oldham, Blackpool, Preston etc

Some of those towns have seen 3 or 4 separate gang convictions. Why are they not in this study?

The north of England is a huge demographic, it comprises one quarter of the population of the whole of the UK. Why are we constantly being ignored?

There have been convictions in other areas, not in "the north", Derby, Telford, Oxford, Peterborough etc but it's the north that is bearing the brunt of this.

Also on racism, it's the gangs who are the racists. Time and time again girls have given evidence that they were racially abuse by the gangs. Called white trash and white slags while the crimes were committed, and that the gangs said they hate white people. The gangs are the racists

Having done a lot of research into this subject, I find this very hard to believe. Firstly, some statistics
In the 2011 census 86% of the population of England and Wales were white, 8% were Asian. The following report states that child sexual abuse offenders of Asian ethnicity ranges from 27% to 75%, because the figures rely on how the offenders were analysed.
98% of sexual abuse offenders are male.

"When CEOP looked only at a group of around 940 offenders that it had better information for it found around 38% were white, 32% were unknown, 26% were Asian and 3% were black."

Really? 32% "unknown"?

They also say this>

"It found that of around 300 offenders whose ethnicity was provided and who were part of groups targeting children based on their vulnerability (rather than because they had a specific sexual interest in children), 75% had been categorised as Asian and 17% as white, 5% were listed as black and 3% as Arab."

fullfact.org/crime/what-do-we-know-about-ethnicity-people-involved-sexual-offences-against-children/

www.basw.co.uk/system/files/resources/basw_34939-8_0.pdf#page=19

I don't think it helps to classify sex offenders by race. For one thing race and culture are not the same thing, and the specific groups who offend in this way do so because of cultural norms ( and by that I mean white lads can have similar contempt for "slags" and the law-it's not confined to one race)
I also don't know that calling the groups of men who do this racist is particularly meaningful. If we are going to look at racism in the badlands of West and South Yorkshire there is history galore of horrific racist abuse towards Asians from Whites so yes, there is racism and there always has been, on both sides, but I don't think it's why girls get abused.
There will always be chancers, there will always be groups of men treating girls badly, or trying to. The point is that they must never ever be above the law, or be able to hide in plain sight, or be able to intimidate the authorities for any reason.
That goes for BBC TV presenters, Royals and Pakistani taxi drivers equally.

I don't think it helps to classify sex offenders by race.

Not even when the victims are being racially targeted?

This article details CSE cases across 13 Northern towns, including Rochdale, Rotherham, Halifax, Keighley, Sheffied, Newcastle etc.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telford_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_child_sex_abuse_ring

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_child_sex_abuse_ring

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_sex_abuse_case

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Doublet

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcastle_sex_abuse_ring

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keighley_child_sex_abuse_ring

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huddersfield_grooming_gang

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_child_sex_abuse_ring

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_child_sex_abuse_ring

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_child_sex_abuse_ring

Flaxmeadow
"Not even when the victims are being racially targeted?"

Exactly, it would appear that racism only works one way. The language used by the perpetrators against the victims in court was vile. The term "Kuffar" was often used as a description of the victim, a if that excuss the behaviour of the abuser.

@NiceGerbil

One thing in common they're all men.

Beat me to it.

Why would anyone think that calling someone Kuffar excuses the behaviour of an abuser?
Not even when the victims are being racially targeted?"
Ok, if a thug puts burning dog shit through the letter box of a Pakistani family, does the race of the thug matter? Does his race make it easier to convict him? Or should he be caught and punished for this no matter who he is?
Even if the girls were targeted because of their races ( I think they were targeted because they were vulnerable, and it's harder to get in trouble if you don't shit on your own doorstep) the point is the girls were not protected from rapists.

... the police refused to investigate due to fears of being branded racist.

I have always held the view that it's more likely that the police were lazy and sexist so didn't take it seriously. Saying they're worried about being called racist is still a shit excuse but sounds (somewhat) better than the truth.

@pinkdragons

I'm really surprised at The Guardian for publishing this. It's an utterly SH*T article with a questionable narrative, that doesn't even make sense.

My newspaper that I loved. Now I don't even click on links, so I have to ask:

Have the daft buggers left comments open and if so are they getting the arse/handed/plate treatment?

I agree the article is short on facts. I also wonder in categorising gangs by ethnicity, does one white member make it a white gang? It seems to make more sense to tabulate by individual offenders’ /gang members ethnicity and then compare to population statistics.

@IfNotNow12

Why would anyone think that calling someone Kuffar excuses the behaviour of an abuser? Not even when the victims are being racially targeted?" Ok, if a thug puts burning dog shit through the letter box of a Pakistani family, does the race of the thug matter? Does his race make it easier to convict him? Or should he be caught and punished for this no matter who he is? Even if the girls were targeted because of their races ( I think they were targeted because they were vulnerable, and it's harder to get in trouble if you don't shit on your own doorstep) the point is the girls were not protected from rapists.

I understand what you are saying here, and there is a sense in which it's true that it really doesn't matter about what thought process lies behind an abusive act - clearly whatever it is, it's wrong.

But from the POV of police work, or trying to change whatever leads to that thought process, it can be important. Gang activity gets into the territory of organised crime, and if you want to deal with organised crime activities, who is involved is an important thing to know. Building up a profile of the group allows the police to target their activities effectively.

It's also not uncommon to have ethnically organised gangs because of reasons completely unrelated to sex abuse per se, but if you want to address the abuse and whatever else they might be involved with, you need to know what is creating an environment where those kinds of gangs thrive.

And in these cases, it was also important in terms of understanding why the problem wasn't being properly addressed by the authorities.

I don't particularly believe any ethnicity is inherently more likely to be bad people, but in a study talking about gangs, it's not surprising that the gangs have some kind of organisational principle, something that ties them together.