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.
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