It has been suggested that this article be merged into Child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom#Group based child sexual exploitation. (Discuss) Proposed since October 2024. |
The grooming gang panic is a moral panic about groups referred to by the conflated terms Asian, Pakistani and Muslim men who sexually abuse young girls in the United Kingdom. Right-wing and far-right activists, as well as more mainstream individuals, helped popularise the terminology in the 2010s.[1][2][3][4] For a general overview unrelated to ethnicity, see Child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom § Group based child sexual exploitation.
Public concerns about South Asian grooming gangs began after multiple high-profile child sex abuse scandals perpetrated primarily by South Asian men, including the Rotherham child sexual abuse scandal in late 2010, in which 1,400 girls as young as 11 were found to have been raped, trafficked, abducted, beaten, and intimidated by men predominantly of Pakistani heritage over a period of 15 years with limited prosecution.[5] It was later exacerbated by the Rochdale child sex abuse case in 2012 and the Telford child sexual exploitation scandal in 2023, in both of which predominantly South Asian men ran grooming and sex trafficking rings, the victims of which were predominantly white English girls and women.[3][6][7]
The statistics have been disputed. A report from the Home Office in 2020 concluded that any causal link between sexual assault and South Asian ethnicity “could not be proven”, in part due to lack of a strong basis in data, as many of the police officers involved did not record the ethnicity of the arrestee.[8] The report suggests there is likely no one community uniquely predisposed to offending, but added that “some studies suggest an over-representation of Black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations.”[8] White people, who make up a majority of the UK's population, also likely make up a majority of the perpetrators of sexual assault and group-based sexual assault crimes in the UK.[9][10] Despite the lack of evidence, British media outlets have reinforced the stereotype by disproportionately reporting on South Asian group-based sexual assault crimes at the expense of other similar cases involving white abusers.[3]: 45
The British media's construction of a specifically South Asian notion of hegemonic masculinity began long before the recent spate of high-profile cases of child sexual exploitation and grooming. The Ouseley report on the Bradford race riots (Ouseley 2001),and the Cantle Report on the Oldham, Burnley and Bradford riots (Cantle 2001), focused on cultural difference as the primary causal factor for these events, maintaining that British South Asians and white Britons led 'parallel lives'. Media coverage of the riots described angry young men who were alienated from society and their own communities, and had become entangled in a life of crime and violence, a vision that provided the bedrock for the construction of what Claire Alexander calls the 'new Asian folk devil' (2000).
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was invoked but never defined (see the help page).it is likely that no one community or culture is uniquely predisposed to offending