AMID ATTACKS ON the British government for old child exploitation scandals, baseless estimates of the amount of victims of so-called “grooming gangs” have resurfaced.

The number of known or carefully estimated victims is staggering. However, the true number of victims is unknown and some figures being shared about are based on a misunderstanding of the known figures, or on misapplications of statistics.

These figures were shared among inflammatory and factless attacks by Elon Musk on the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government, which he claims failed to protect children during sexual exploitation scandals (that occurred under previous governments).

Cases in which groups of men, mostly of South Asian backgrounds, were convicted of the sexual abuse of vulnerable girls in a number of UK cities between 2010 and 2014 have been brought back to the fore of UK politics in recent weeks.

The issue as a whole has been used by anti-immigrant agitators and politicians in the UK, who often allege the country has a “two-tier” policing system that discriminates against white people and is more lenient towards those with foreign backgrounds.

The subject has come to the fore since Elon Musk launched a campaign on New Year’s Day on social media platform X that has involved calls for Britain’s King Charles to dissolve parliament, for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to be jailed, and for the United States to “liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”.

Among Musk’s claims are that “a quarter million little girls were raped” by grooming gangs.

Musk’s figure echoes that put forward by Malcolm Pearson (or Baron Pearson of Rannoch), who has repeatedly made claimed that “upwards of 250,000 young white girls raped in this century, very largely by Muslim men, usually several times a day for years”.

The Journal has asked Pearson for his source of this figure, but has not received a reply by the time of writing.

Other claims have also spread on social media putting the figure even higher.

“There’s been a million white children — one million white kids in the last few decades that have been raped by Muslim-Pakistani men,” a British woman shouts at an Arab man in one video being shared on Instagram.

Musk has also re-shared other users’ posts that there were more than one million victims (though these contradict figures contained within his own posts).

But there is no basis for these figures.

‘Grooming gang’ scandals

There have been various investigations and reports into individual cases of child grooming in the UK in recent years.

In 2010, five men were given lengthy jail terms after they were found guilty of grooming teenage girls in Rotherham for sex.

In 2012, reports in The Times newspaper claimed that details from 200 restricted-access documents showed police and child protection agencies in Rotherham had extensive knowledge of these activities for a decade, yet a string of offences went unprosecuted.

The same year, nine men were convicted over a grooming scandal in Rochdale.

There have been other similar cases since then. Following a series of trials at Leeds Crown Court in 2018, it was reported that a gang of men who embarked on a “campaign of rape and other sexual abuse” against vulnerable teenage girls in Huddersfield were jailed.

Some police departments in affected areas have since apologised for failing the victims.

The Jay Report

The most cited research on the number of victims by child grooming gangs and others comes from the 2014 independent inquiry by Professor Alexis Jay, a former social worker, into child exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. This is usually referred to as The Jay Report.

This report included more than one-hundred interviews, often with council members, police, survivors, and groups of young people.

Its most cited finding comes from the stark opening line of its Executive Summary: “No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full Inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013.”

This is a staggering number, especially considering Rotherham Borough is an area with a population of around 265,000 people.

There are no estimates in the report, however, for a national figure, nor are there any credible ones available, often due to the fact that there is no separate legal category for “grooming gang” crimes as opposed to other sexual offences.

In its section on prevalence, the inquiry found that there were “fundamental flaws with both the criminal justice and children’s social care data sets” in this area.

“As a consequence,” it said, “it is simply not possible to know the scale of child sexual exploitation by networks.”

So, how did this figure of 1,400 victims in Rotherham translate into claims that there were a quarter of a million or more across the United Kingdom?

Multiplying victims

The claim of 1,000,000 victims appears to have derived from an interview given by Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, to The Mirror newspaper.

From there, it has been amplified by Malcolm Pearson, the peer that Elon Musk appears to be citing, who read it into record an estimate of the victims of “radical Muslim grooming gangs”.

In 2015, Champion told The Mirror about child exploitation: “There are hundreds of thousands and I think there could be up to a million victims of exploitation nationwide.”

Nowhere in the interview did she specify that she was talking only about white girls, or mention the ethnicity or religion of the attackers, or even specify that the figure only related to organised or gang exploitation (though the paper’s headline does imply that).

Champion’s figure is not unrealistic: police forces in England and Wales recorded 105,286 child sexual abuse offences during 2022.

A survey published by the ONS in 2020 found that about 7.5% of adults in England and Wales had experienced some form of sexual abuse before the age of 16, including about 3.5% of men and 11.5% of women, equivalent to around 3.1 million people

Even still, the figure given by Champion is questionable. Full Fact quoted Champion as explaining how she derived her estimate:

“I extrapolated that Rotherham is a town [of] 200,000 and had 1,400 known victims of CSE [child sexual exploitation] between 1997-2013 and 15% of women report their rape – so scaled up,” she said.

But there are a few problems with this.

Firstly, the Jay report was for Rotherham Borough (population 265,000), not the town, and secondly the maths doesn’t result in a figure near one million. 

Champion appears to be suggesting that only 15% of rapes in Rotherham were reported, meaning she believes the true figure is closer to 9,333 victims. The population of Rotherham makes up about 1/258th of the UK, so presumably she then multiplies 9,333 by 258 to get her answer. 

However, this does not give us a million. It gives us a figure more than twice as high. 

Even if the maths did add up, there are reasons to think the Rotherham figure should not be mapped on to the wider UK.

The report notes that due to the ability of Risky Business, a youth outreach project that helped uncover the scandal, to attract referrals directly from children and parents affected by sexual exploitation, as well as “the attention given to child sexual exploitation at a multiagency level over the years [...] the problem would have been more visible in Rotherham than in some other parts of the country”. If this scenario was translated to other areas, the proportion of unreported cases would fall in tandem.

Further, Rotherham was not randomly selected. The inquiry was commissioned because it was the location of one of the biggest and most notorious sex exploitation cases.

In other words, Champion applied the rate of child exploitation in a location selected for being a hotspot for child sexual exploitation to the whole of the UK, when it may not have been appropriate to do so.

This is a bit like estimating the number of people harmed in The Troubles by doing a survey of Omagh in the late 90s and then scaling it up.

It is also important to note that the number in The Jay Report does not refer just to victims of groups (though it does include these, including Asian gangs), but to all victims of child sexual exploitation.

Champion this week told Press Association that her extrapolation involved scaling up the figures for a “70-year period”, and acknowledged that was a “completely unreliable” estimate.

Racial elements

Although Champion did not seem to conflate sexual exploitation by gangs with all child sexual exploitation, others using the 1 million figure have.

Indeed, many people have added racial elements to these figures that do not reflect the reports findings or its figure of 1,400 girl victims which, unlike what others have implied was not just a count of white victims — in fact, The Jay Report has a section discussing the sexual abuse of Asian girls.

The Jay Report noted that the majority of the known perpetrators in Rotherham were of Pakistani origin, and the majority of suspected perpetrators were categorised as Asian.

However, it went on to say that “there is no simple link between race and child sexual exploitation, and across the UK the greatest numbers of perpetrators of CSE [Child Sexual Exploitation] are white men”.

Sex abuse scandals involving white perpetrators have been a feature of British national discussion, including the crimes and cover-up of Britain’s most notorious sex offender, Jimmy Savile, who is believed to have sexually abused hundreds of people, mostly children.

In 2022, Prince Andrew paid a sex abuse victim to drop a case accusing him of sexually assaulting her as part of Jeffrey Epstein’s organised sexual exploitation of girls.

This trend was reiterated in a December 2020 report released by the UK Home Office entitled “Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation: Characteristics of Offending”, which found that “group-based CSE offenders are most commonly white”.

“Some studies suggest an over-representation of Black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations,” it said.

“However, it is not possible to conclude that this is representative of all group-based CSE offending.”

That report also estimated that, since a “CSE flag” was introduced to police records of crime, about 10,500 crimes were flagged as being CSE-related in just the first two months of 2020 — again, a huge and concerning number. However, it was unable to attribute differences between ethnicities in the amount of offenders.

Indeed, the scale of child sexual abuse in the UK is stark, with police forces in England and Wales recording 105,286 child sexual abuse offences during 2022.

However, statistics on these crimes again show that 88% of these are attributed to white offenders.

The total number of victims of “grooming gangs”, Asian or otherwise, is unknown.

And although the number of known cases in the scandal referred to by Elon Musk is staggeringly high, some figures cited are often completely baseless and are being shared to demonise certain ethnicities.

Ultimately, these ignore evidence that most instances of child sexual abuse in the UK are carried out by white people.  

With reporting from David MacRedmond and the Press Association.

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