Luton Outlaws - Independent Message Board for Luton Town FC

Actually, maybe we are both wrong . . . no-one actually seems to know . . .

What is fundamentally important to me though is that if we are going after grooming gangs, we go after all of the bastards whether they be white, brown, black or whatever. We don't limit ourselves to fixing part of the problem. That's why I take issue with it being framed as a purely Asian problem when it simply isn't.

4.3.8. Perpetrator Ethnicity
The national data on ethnicity recorded against suspects is poor, whether collected through self-definition or ethnic appearance[footnote 129]. It is not good enough to support any statements about the ethnicity of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders at the national level.

In its 2022 final report, repeating a finding made in numerous previous reports, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA)[footnote 130] noted that data relating to the ethnicity of perpetrators were lacking and recommended improvements should be made by children’s social services and criminal justice agencies.

Since then, the National Police Chief’s Council has taken a number of steps to improve the collection of data on child sexual abuse and exploitation, including the NPCC’s Vulnerability Knowledge Practice Programme annual publication on all CSAE recorded crimes and the CSE Taskforce’s Complex and Organised Child Abuse Dataset (COCAD), widely referenced already in this report. We found the

NPCC’s VKPP and COCAD reports to have advanced the data on CSAE offending and certainly more so than other criminal justice agencies or children’s services data.

The VKPP Report for 2023[footnote 131] notes that ethnicity was recorded for only 31% of perpetrators, but goes on to record the ethnicity breakdown (88% ‘White’, 5% as ‘Asian’, 3% as ‘Black’, 2% as ‘Mixed’ and 1% as ‘Chinese or other’) and compare it with Census ethnic distribution in the general population.

In the November 2024 CSE Taskforce COCAD report, self-defined ethnicity data was published for all ‘contact’ group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse crimes in 2023 where two or more suspects had been identified (including offending in family, institutional and other settings). It also outlined an ethnicity profile for suspects that aligns fairly closely with 2021 Census data for the general population in England and Wales[footnote 132] (88% White, 7% Asian, 5% Black, 3% Mixed and 2% Other), with a caveat noted in the report that self-defined ethnicity was only recorded for 34% of suspects.

With over two thirds of ethnicity data missing for perpetrators in the VKPP report and nearly two thirds missing in COCAD, it is not possible to draw any conclusions on the representation of ethnic groups amongst perpetrators from this published data set.

This audit took the same published data set and reconfigured it. If perpetrators for whom ethnicity was not known or declared are included in the data and percentage breakdowns, the figures look very different, with 28% of perpetrators identifying as White:

Ethnicity Number Percentage
White 1,884 28%
Asian 165 2%
Black 110 2%
Mixed 60 <1%
Other 47 <1%
Not declared 4,404 66%
Totals 6,670 100%
Presenting the data without the ‘unknowns’ where the identification of ethnicity is at such a low level is misleading.