Home Secretary orders investigation into ethnic origin of sexual grooming gangs
Sajid Javid said the government attaches the 'highest priority to tackling child sexual exploitation'
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Your support makes all the difference.Sajid Javid has ordered an investigation into why members of sexual grooming gangs are disproportionately from a Pakistani background.
The Home Secretary said the controversial move would explore the “particular characteristics” of offenders in order to prevent cases like those suffered in Rotherham, Telford and Newcastle.
Mr Javid said that the issue would be addressed head on as the government “attaches the highest priority to tackling child sexual exploitation”.
It comes after Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, was criticised last year for claiming the UK “has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”.
The Home secretary made his commitment to explore the issue in a letter to Ms Champion after it emerged that she had increased her security after receiving death threats.
Mr Javid said: “MPs should be able to do their job without being threatened or intimidated in any way. Sarah Champion has my full support.”
He went on: “My officials have been working with investigating officers in relevant cases, and with the National Crime Agency, to establish the particular characteristics and contexts associated with this type of offending.”
The minister, whose own family roots are in Pakistan, said understanding more about gang networks would “support a more targeted response by the police and other agencies” and added: “If there is a need for further research, we will take it forward.”
It follows a letter written to him from a cross-party working group of MPs, who said they were “alarmed by the similarities in cases across the country”, with the call for research into “common patterns of behaviour”.
The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal saw gangs undertake the organised sexual abuse of children from the late 1980s until the 2010s and the failure of local authorities to act.
Rotherham Council finally commissioned an independent inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay, which found in August 2014 that some 1,400 children, most of them white girls, were abused by predominantly British-Pakistani men.
A Home Office spokesman said: “If evidence suggests that there are cultural factors that may be driving certain types of offending, we are fully committed to addressing these.”
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