What do we know about ethnicity and sexual abuse?
Experts say data on child sexual abuse should be treated with caution because many victims never come forward, or do so years afterward. Still, data on the ethnicity of child sexual abuse victims and perpetrators was released by the Labour government in November — the first of its kind published by any British government — showing that 83 percent of perpetrators convicted in 2023 were white and 7 percent were Asian, broadly in line with the country’s overall demographics. (In official U.K. statistics, “Asian” is a very broad term that can refer to people with Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Chinese heritage, or from other parts of South Asia.)
Nazir Afzal, the chief prosecutor for the North West England region from 2011-2015, himself of Pakistani heritage, said in 2015: “There is no getting away from the fact that there are Pakistani gangs grooming vulnerable girls.”
He went on to say that South Asians were “disproportionately involved” in specific types of street grooming that were highlighted by the cases in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere, although more common types of child sexual abuse nationally are predominantly carried out by white British men.
The racial element of these high-profile cases became a common right-wing talking point, even as experts noted that ethnicity is not a predictor of a propensity to abuse children, and widespread child abuse was long covered up in other communities and institutions including the Roman Catholic Church. The trope has also been weaponized by the far right, including by terrorists. The white supremacist who killed 51 people in two mosques in New Zealand in 2019 carried a gun marked with the words “For Rotherham.”
When did Mr. Musk begin talking about this?
In October, Jess Phillips, a Labour lawmaker and minister for safeguarding, rejected a request from the local government in Oldham, a town near Manchester, for a national public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the area in the 2000s and 2010s. A 2022 report commissioned by the Labour mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, found that children were failed by the police and local authorities in Oldham between 2011 and 2014.
