Ministers on Monday faced accusations of “creating blind spots” in efforts to tackle child sex abuse after they insisted “political correctness” was stopping authorities’ in their efforts to prosecute British Pakistani perpetrators.
Home secretary Suella Braverman said it was “not racist” to point out that a series of high-profile cases of abuse of girls in the towns of Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford had been committed “by largely British Pakistani men”.
Prime minister Rishi Sunak backed up the home secretary, saying that complaints from victims and whistleblowers about abuse had been ignored “due to cultural sensitivity and political correctness”. “That is not right,” he told Sky News.
Braverman and Sunak made the comments during a visit to the north of England to launch a new package of measures to tackle sex abuse, including a proposal to legally require those who work with children to report suspicions of crime or face prosecution.
Speaking to GB News from Rochdale, Braverman said there had been “cultural trends” in the practices of the perpetrators, while authorities and professionals had “turned a blind eye out of fear of being called racist”.
However, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, child protection charities and criminal experts warned that spotlighting a single group risked distracting the police from abuse committed by other perpetrators.
Research has shown that white people are responsible for most sexual abuse of children in the UK.
Ella Cockbain, an associate professor at University College London’s school of security and crime science, said the focus on the abuse of white girls by Pakistani men could mean that harm against other groups would be ignored by the authorities.
“If you zoom in so narrowly on one definition of abuse, what you end up doing is overlooking or neglecting the abuse of other children,” Cockbain said.
Braverman’s comments conflicted with findings of research conducted for the government in 2020, Cockbain added. “The Home Office actually found . . . that there’s no reliable, nationally representative evidence that any one ethnic group is over-represented among grooming gangs,” Cockbain said. “We know the majority of offenders are white.”
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a charity, wrote on Twitter that sexual predators targeted all kinds of “vulnerable and accessible children”.
“There must be a focus on more than race so we don’t create blind spots that prevent victims from being identified,” the organisation wrote.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, male gangs were involved in the large-scale grooming of local children for sex across Telford, Rotherham and Rochdale. At the time, social workers suspected the girls were suffering abuse but largely failed to act.
Following the scandal, there were claims that some social workers feared they would be seen as racist for reporting the predominantly Asian perpetrators to the police.
Starmer, who when director of public prosecutions made the decision to prosecute those involved in the Rotherham abuse, agreed that “political correctness” should not “get in the way” of prosecutions.
Starmer said on Monday that he was “all for” clamping down on sexual abuse but it was necessary to be honest about the overall picture.
He added: “The vast majority of sexual abuse cases do not involve those from ethnic minorities.”
