Priti: Don’t let PC fears hamper sex gangs fight

Police were yesterday ordered to always record the ethnicity of sex attackers to protect children from grooming gangs.

Priti Patel wants to brush aside fears of ‘political correctness’ to help stop groups of men preying on vulnerable teenagers. Home office research, published yesterday, showed there were huge gaps in ethnic data when trying to create a profile of child grooming gangs.

The Home Secretary said: ‘What happened to these children remains one of the biggest stains on our country’s conscience.

‘This paper demonstrates how difficult it has been to draw conclusions about the characteristics of offenders.’

An estimated 1,400 children, mostly white British girls, were found to be abused in Rotherham by British-Pakistani men between 1997 and 2003. Yesterday’s report was commissioned in the wake of high-profile grooming gang cases such as this.

Miss Patel added: ‘it is difficult to draw conclusions about the ethnicity of offenders as existing research is limited and data collection is poor. This is disappointing because community and cultural factors are clearly relevant to understanding and tackling offending.’

The report had stated: ‘it is likely that no one community or culture is uniquely predisposed to offending.’ The handful of available studies did indicate ‘an over-representation of Asian and Black offenders’ related to demography. However, most offenders were still found to be white.