New policies will let the police use “ethnicity data.” abuse
The Tories are dredging up old racist myths about Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE). Prime minister Rishi Sunak announced a flurry of new measures that he claims would tackle young women being targeted by so-called “grooming gangs”.
Sunak is set to announce that a new “grooming gang taskforce’ will be set up, supported by the National Crime Agency. This new initiative is due to use “ethnicity data” during police investigations.
And he wants new laws that provide tougher sentences for perpetrators by making their membership of gangs a factor. He’s paved the way for these measures by declaring it was “political correctness” stopping authorities from acting on CSE.
Experts are warning that these measures could actually obscure the reality of CSE—therefore putting many more children at risk. Peter Wanless from the NSPCC charity said, “There must be a focus on more than just race so we do not create new blind spots that prevent victims from being identified.
And at the weekend, home secretary Suella Braverman went one further than the inferences of her boss and specifically blamed British Pakistanis for CSE. “We’ve seen institutions and state agencies—whether it’s social workers, teachers, the police turn a blind eye to signs of abuse out of political correctness, out of fear of being called racists,” she said.
“What we’ve seen is a practice whereby vulnerable, white, English girls, sometimes in care, sometimes who are in challenging circumstances, being pursued and raped and drugged and harmed by gangs of British-Pakistani, men who’ve worked in child abuse rings or networks.”
Braverman is wrong on two major counts. First, it’s not true that British Pakistani men are primarily responsible for running grooming gangs targeting exclusively white girls. Evidence has shown that a large number of boys and girls who aren’t white suffer horrendous abuse.
And it’s a myth that it’s just Asian men who are responsible. But this lie continues because it’s whipped up by the media, figures on the far right, and the Tory government.
CSE researcher Ella Cockbain told Socialist Worker in 2018 her research indicated that the picture of who were victims and who were perpetrators was much more mixed. She said there was little evidence of race or religion playing a role in high-profile CSE cases, such as Rochdale and Derby.
And an official Home Office report—Braverman’s own department—in 2020 showed that the majority of CSE gangs were made up of white men. It reported, “Research has found that group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are most commonly white.
“Some studies suggest an overrepresentation of black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations. “However, it is not possible to conclude that this is representative of all group-based CSE offending.”
Braverman is wrong about why authorities were so slow to act on reports. It wasn’t because of fears of “cultural sensitivities”, as she claimed. It was because the allegations were coming from young women, often from very poor areas, who were repeatedly not believed by those in authority positions.
Corrupt police officers helped perpetrators evade justice, while top cops in affected areas like Rotherham systematically refused to believe victims. After conducting a review of South Yorkshire Police’s handling of CSE between 1997 and 2014, Professor John Drew identified a slew of “serious failings from the cops”.
Yet on the charge of fears of racism stopping police action, he said that he “received little evidence on this point.” By making the investigation of CSE specifically a mechanism to target Asian men, the Tories do a disservice to the real victims of these abhorrent crimes.
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