When Louise Casey’s audit into the grooming-gangs scandal was published yesterday, it told us what most of us have known for a long time – namely, that men of Pakistani Muslim heritage are overrepresented in these terrible crimes.
For years, there were people in the spheres of British politics, academia and media who claimed that the ‘narrative’ of ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ was somehow false. It was dismissed as a ‘moral panic’ and even as a far-right conspiracy theory, supposedly designed to demonise an ethnic and religious community. Indeed, whenever the prevalence of Pakistani Muslim men in grooming gangs was raised by a public figure, academics and journalists would swoop in to declare – falsely – that this was a lie that is debunked by the data.
Take Dr Ella Cockbain, an associate professor in security and crime science at University College London. Her work was heavily cited by an infamous Home Office report on grooming gangs in 2020, which was leapt upon by activists to downplay the disproportion of Pakistani perpetrators. Back in 2012, she co-authored a Guardian article with Helen Brayley-Morris, who is now in a deputy-director role in the Home Office. They wrote: ‘Despite the conviction of nine Asian men for child exploitation in Rochdale and worrying signs in the statistics, racial profiling won’t help potential victims.’ A year later, Cockbain published the academic article, ‘Grooming and the “Asian sex-gang predator”: the construction of a racial crime threat’.
I had an exchange with Cockbain on Twitter in 2018, after then Tory minister Sajid Javid branded grooming gangs a disgrace on ‘our Pakistani heritage’. When I stood up for Javid, Cockbain claimed in response that ‘the dominant narrative that we have an “Asian grooming-gang problem” rests on very shaky foundations’. She said this under a post made by Dr Zubaida Haque, the former director of the Runnymede Trust. Haque accused Javid, a British Pakistani, of ‘using far-right narrative’ to pathologise British Pakistanis.
This denial of the overrepresentation of men of Pakistani Muslim heritage is highlighted in Casey’s audit. As she makes clear, there have been serious issues with ethnicity data collection by public authorities when dealing with members of grooming gangs. Nevertheless, there is ‘enough evidence’ from local police data to conclude that there are ‘disproportionate numbers of men from Asian backgrounds’ involved in this specific form of abuse. Yet this hasn’t stopped academics, journalists and civil servants from claiming otherwise.
Casey’s report is positively scathing about the 2020 Home Office paper – and those who seized on it to deny the truth about the grooming-gangs scandal. ‘It is quoted and requoted in official reports, the media and elsewhere as proof that claims made about “Asian grooming gangs” are sensationalised or untrue’, she notes, ‘although this audit found it hard to understand how the Home Office paper reached that conclusion, which does not seem to be evidenced in research or data’.
While evidence-free claims that deflect from the truth about grooming gangs have been given plenty of airtime, academics who have followed the evidence have been dismissed and ignored. A 2020 study by professors Kish Bhatti-Sinclair and Charles Sutcliffe, which concluded that men of Pakistani Muslim origin dominate prosecutions for ‘group-localised child sexual exploitation’, faced all kinds of ideologically motivated attacks. The paper not only considered ethnicity, but also occupations, flagging the role of the ‘night-time economy’ in group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse, especially taxis and street takeaways. Despite it being a comprehensive study with a series of insightful observations, this paper was not referenced at all in the 2020 Home Office report.
It is vital that public authorities collect data on the social and demographic characteristics of criminals. That is not bigoted racial profiling – it is about developing a sound understanding of on-the-ground realities, including cultural factors that might make certain crimes more likely. This is essential for us to know if we want to protect the most vulnerable in society.
The identitarian-grievance complex seeks to protect minorities at all costs – even if it means bending the truth beyond recognition, gaslighting those with perfectly decent concerns, and sacrificing underaged grooming-gang victims on the altar of multiculturalism. MPs, Home Office officials, civil servants, university academics and much of the charity sector have all played a role in deflecting from these crimes.
The public should always reserve a degree of scepticism when it comes to those in positions of authority and influence. All too often, as the grooming-gangs scandal shows, they do not have the interests of the most vulnerable at heart.
Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.
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