PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Offences against Children: Convictions (11 February 2021)

The paper ‘Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation: Characteristics of Offending’, published in December 2020, set out the available evidence on the demographics of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders.

The limitations of the available data are disappointing, particularly as understanding the contexts in which offending occurs is pertinent to identifying, preventing and tackling offending.

Child sexual exploitation often involves a number of different sexual and non-sexual offences, and there is no discrete set of offences that are exclusive to group-based child sexual exploitation. Data on characteristics such as ethnicity are not routinely collected and are subject to inaccuracies in recording. Importantly, the data that is collected is limited to the cases that are identified, and we know that most child sexual abuse goes unreported. All of these factors limit our understanding of the characteristics of offending.

As set out in the Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Strategy, published in January 2021, we are committed to addressing these issues as a priority. We have invested in analysts in each of the policing regions who will produce quarterly data on child sexual abuse cases undertaken by police forces, as well as maintaining a Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Operations Database which will capture details of victims and offender numbers, characteristics (including ethnicity), and modus operandi.

Building on this, we will engage with criminal justice agencies, charities, safeguarding partners, academics and think tanks to understand better the barriers to collecting accurate data on ethnicity and other characteristics, and to address these barriers so that local and national agencies have a robust picture of the characteristics of offenders.