The central argument of the ‘grooming gangs’ narrative is, in short, that a ‘disproportionate’ number of Asian/Muslim/Pakistani-heritage men are involved in grooming (mostly) white British girls for organised sexual abuse. These claims are often substantiated with reference to a spate of high-profile prosecutions of so-called ‘grooming gangs’ in towns and cities such as Rotherham, Rochdale, Derby, Telford, Oxford, Huddersfield and Newcastle. The offenders in question – and undoubtedly many more – have absolutely committed horrific crimes; this article is categorically not about denying their existence, belittling their harms or otherwise excusing the inexcusable. The term ‘grooming gangs’, however, is itself a spurious media construct and one that has been heavily racialised from the very start. ‘Grooming gangs’ simply do not correspond to established legal or social scientific categories and the various weak definitions offered up by proponents of this racialised narrative fail to delineate these offenders meaningfully from other groups of child sex offenders. Contrary to stereotypes, there is no ‘grooming’ offence5 – let alone a ‘grooming gangs’ offence; consequently, ‘grooming gang offenders’ cannot be sensibly disentangled from police recorded crime data or prosecution data. Moreover, and as will be shown later, a relatively small number of high-profile ‘grooming gangs’ cases have been used to claim an ‘epidemic’ of abuse. Despite routinely (and wrongly) being depicted as a ‘specific’ crime type, ‘grooming gangs’ are better understood as a vaguely and inconsistently defined subset of child sexual exploitation (CSE) offenders.6 Complicating matters further, however, CSE is itself a poorly delineated subset of child sexual abuse (CSA) that spans diverse criminal offences (e.g. rape, sexual activity with a child) – most of which are also used in instances that would not normally be considered CSE. Existing data simply do not enable reliable assessments of the prevalence or correlates of CSE, let alone those of ‘grooming gangs’ – so claims of ethnic or religious disproportionality in ‘grooming gangs’ are just not testable in any meaningful sense.
