“Above all, we need to ask why so many males, both young and old, think it is acceptable to treat both girls and boys as objects to be used and abused. We need to consider why professionals still miss the signs of abuse, and also to consider the impact of pornography on children,” wrote Sue Berelowitz on the release of the Office for the Children’s Commission interim report in Child Sexual exploitation in gangs and groups. The report was disturbing; around 16,500 children were deemed to be at high risk of child sex exploitation yet much of the response to the report was on whether it under-played the representation of Pakistani men in child sex exploitation (CSE).
As much as I agree with Berelowitz that Pakistani men abusing girls is one model among many models of CSE, the statistics in the report, which does not include data from all police forces, suggest there is an over-representation of Pakistani men working in groups guilty of on-street grooming, as opposed to acting alone or online which is predominately carried out by white men. Out of 77 recent convictions for on-street grooming by gangs, 67 have involved men of Pakistani origin. Further limited figures of this over-representation can be read here. However, finger-pointing at either under-emphasising or over-emphasising the ethnicities of the perpetrators do not help the victims who insensitively become political pawns.
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