LONDON (AP) — The UK government said Monday it will make it mandatory for the police to record the ethnicity and nationality of suspects accused of child sexual abuse and exploitation.
The move is part of an attempt to address long-running accusations that authorities have “shied away” from properly tackling the issue of race when investigating such cases.
It comes came after the government announced Saturday that it will hold a national inquiry into organized child sexual abuse, something it has long been pressured to do by opposition politicians.
In a statement to Parliament, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said a recent review of data from three police forces found “clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men” who prey on often young and vulnerable girls and women.
But the review found that ethnicity data was not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators in what the British press have dubbed ”grooming gang” crimes.
“The appalling lack of data on ethnicity in crime recording alone is a major failing over the last decade or more,” said the review, overseen by Louise Casey, an expert on victim’s rights and social welfare. “Questions about ethnicity have been asked but dodged for years.”
“Child sexual exploitation is horrendous whoever commits it, but there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination,” it added.
The review referred to examples of organizations that avoided the topic of race altogether “for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions.”
It said: “The question of the ethnicity of perpetrators has been a key question for this audit, having been raised in inquiries and reports going back many years. We found that the ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, so we are unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data.”
Cooper noted that while Casey’s review also identified cases in which perpetrators were white, British, European, or other ethnicities, there wasn’t enough information to help prevent patterns of crime from being understood and tackled.
Britain’s justice system has seen multiple cases of underage girls — some as young as 10, and others who were vulnerable because they were in social care or had disabilities — sexually exploited by groups of men in different towns and cities in the 2000s and 2010s.
In some of the most high-profile cases to come to trial, the perpetrators were men of Pakistani heritage and the victims were predominantly white girls.
The issue has been taken up by right-of-center politicians including Reform UK leader Nigel Farage to link child sexual abuse to immigration. It was more recently stoked by Elon Musk, who took to his X platform earlier this year to condemn Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the issue.
Cooper said Monday that as a further step to tackle the issue, laws will be changed so that any adult man who engages in penetrative sex with a child under 16 will face a mandatory rape charge.
Officials also said detectives will follow up on more than 800 cold cases involving child sex abuse by grooming gangs.
A seven-year inquiry was held under the previous Conservative government, but many of the 20 recommendations it made in 2022 — including compensation for abuse victims — have yet to be implemented.
