The grooming gang review has found that ongoing cases involving group-based child sexual exploitation are heavily tied to migrants and supposed asylum seekers in Britain.
Asylum seekers and other migrants comprise a “significant proportion” of suspects in ongoing police investigations according to a government-backed review from Baroness Louise Casey published this week.
In addition to studying examples of historic child rape grooming gangs, the Casey review said that it was given insight into around a dozen ongoing police operations into current grooming gang activity in Britain.
“While the future outcomes of these investigations remain unknown, and the number of live, open cases we had access to was limited, this audit noted that a significant proportion of these cases appear to involve suspects who are non-UK nationals and/or who are claiming asylum in the UK,” the review stated.
The claims may but increased pressure on the government to stem the record waves of illegal migrants continuing to flow into the country across the English Channel from France.
The major finding of the review was that men of Pakistani-heritage were significantly overrepresented in a number of grooming gang cases, backing up previous reports which found a prevalence within the Pakistani community to sexually exploit and abuse often young white working class girls from disadvantaged backgrounds.
However, as was found in previous reports, this was often overlooked or outright covered up by local officials and police for fear of appearing racist or stoking community tensions.
In an interview following the release of her review, Baroness Casey said that in one instance she even discovered the word “Pakistani” manually blanked out with Tipex [Whiteout] from a child’s file.
“I think you’ve got sort of do-gooders that don’t really want this to be found because, you know, ‘Oh, God, then all the racists are going to be more racist’,”‘ she told Sky News.
Thus, the Casey report called on the government to begin actively tracking the ethnicities of child sex offenders.
“The appalling lack of data on ethnicity in crime recording alone is a major failing over the last decade or more. Questions about ethnicity have been asked but dodged for years,” the report stated.
“Child sexual exploitation is horrendous whoever commits it, but there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination.”
The government has been facing calls to also record and publicise the crime rates of alleged asylum seekers and various ethnic minority groups living in Britain for all offences. Unlike other European nations like Denmark, the UK does not provide any such data for public consumption.
However, some recent reports have found that certain migrant groups are far more likely to commit crimes than their British counterparts or indeed migrants from other cultures. Indeed, a report in April from the Daily Mail, based on Freedom of Information requests to police forces in England and Wales, found that migrants from Afghanistan and Sudan were the most likely to be arrested on suspicion of sex crimes.
The report found that Sudanese migrants were 20 times more likely to be arrested for sex crimes than British natives, while Afghanis were over 18 times more likely. Conversely, migrants from countries like Canada and Germany had a lower arrest rate than native Britons, leading some to suggest that migration policy should be limited to countries that demonstrate less criminality.
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