Grooming gangs: Police 'do not accurately understand issue'

Police still do not have an accurate understanding of "grooming gangs", despite years of concerns about the problem, the police watchdog has said.

His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) reviewed 27 cases.

Data collection was "unreliable", it said, and intelligence gathering "wasn't prioritised".

It found most offenders were white, despite the concerns of politicians about "Asian" grooming gangs.

The Home Office announced the creation of a taskforce to deal with the gangs in April.

HM Inspector of Constabulary, Wendy Williams, said "the pace of change needs to increase, and this starts with understanding the problem".

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Concerns about groups of men who groom children on the streets and then sexually abuse them go back more than a decade.

Large gangs of abusers in Rotherham, Rochdale, South Yorkshire, Oxford and Telford have been jailed, and a public inquiry found this sort of abuse had caused life-long "devastation and harm" to young victims.

In its report published on Friday, the HMICFRS said though some progress had been made more recently, "we expected to find, ten years later, that the police and other organisations had a greater understanding of the problem and had developed effective responses to protect children".

"In many respects, we were disappointed.

"We found that an accurate view of group-based child sexual exploitation still wasn't available to the police service.

"Most forces weren't gathering data and intelligence on these crimes."

The inspectorate reviewed 52 investigations involving the sexual exploitation of children, of which 27 uncovered abuse by groups.

There has been a fierce debate about the ethnicity of those involved.

In April, the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman highlighted the "overwhelming" involvement of British-Pakistani men, pointing to three notorious cases in Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford.

However the HMICFRS found, of the 27 investigations it examined, "the most common ethnic group of offenders was white; the next most common ethnic group was Asian or British Asian. Other ethnic groups were also represented in the sample".

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The inspectorate did not give further details, or name the forces it involved. It also said "our sample size isn't fully representative".

"We know that child sexual exploitation, group-based or otherwise, extends far beyond the confines of towns and cities with a high concentration of residents of South Asian heritage," the report said.

In 2022 the Home Office asked the police to collect ethnicity data for every suspected offender taken into custody.

However, this report found that when first arrested, police often weren't sure what suspects had been doing.

"Therefore, data collected at that time might be inaccurate and of little value," the watchdog said.

It recommended the Home Office adopt a more consistent way of tracking abuse by grooming gangs.

Of the 27 police investigations examined by the watchdog, nine were assessed as "good", 14 as "requiring improvement" and four as "inadequate."

It highlighted the use of officers who were not specialised in sexual abuse investigations, warning that they often lacked experience and training.

It also raised concerns about "victim blaming" by the police, often seen as a reason in the past for young people who have been abused not coming forward.

The inspectors found "inappropriate language" was used on a few occasions in the three of the six forces they examined more closely.

One example, relating to a young female victim, was a note that concerns had been raised due to "her general proclivity with older men".

The National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) accepted there was still a problem with "victim blaming", but said the new national police taskforce was now supporting 40 investigations nationally, advised by a Crown Prosecution Service specialist unit.

The NPCC lead for child protection, Ian Critchley, said: "We will not be complacent, and we recognise there is still more to be done as highlighted in this report."

"We will continue to listen to victims and use these recommendations to support our improvements with forces across the country."