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The British government said Monday it will make it mandatory for the police to record the ethnicity and nationality of suspects accused of child sexual abuse and exploitation.
The move is part of an attempt to address long-running accusations that authorities have shied away from properly tackling the issue of race when investigating such cases.
It came after the government announced Saturday that it will hold a national inquiry into organized child sexual abuse, something it has long been pressured to do by opposition politicians.
In a statement to Parliament, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said a new review of data from three police forces found “clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men” who prey on often young and vulnerable girls and women.
But the review, published Monday, found that ethnicity data was “shied away from” and not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators in crimes involving ”grooming gangs” — those involving multiple perpetrators coercing, manipulating and deceiving children into sex, the review said.
“The appalling lack of data on ethnicity in crime recording alone is a major failing over the last decade or more,” said the review, overseen by Louise Casey, an expert on victim’s rights and social welfare. “Questions about ethnicity have been asked but dodged for years.”
“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,” it added.
The review referred to examples of organizations that avoided the topic of race altogether “for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions.”
Cooper noted that while Casey’s review also identified cases in which perpetrators were white, British, European, or other ethnicities, there wasn’t enough information to help prevent patterns of crime from being understood and tackled.
