Yasir Khan
When The Telegraph published Hardeep Singh’s article titled “The Grooming Gangs Rapists Are Mainly Pakistani Muslims, Not ‘Asian’,” it revived a narrative Britain has been trying to move past; one where the fight against child sexual exploitation is reduced to a matter of ethnicity and religion. The piece claimed to expose a “suppressed truth,” yet what it actually did was distort evidence and weaponise identity in one of the most painful and sensitive areas of public life.
At the heart of this argument lies a falsehood: that there exists clear, comprehensive data linking child sexual exploitation in Britain to a single nationality or faith group. In fact, official evidence shows the opposite. The National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (Casey Audit, 2025) explicitly states that ethnicity is unrecorded for two-thirds of all perpetrators. Without this data, any sweeping claim about who commits these crimes is statistically meaningless.
Even the UK Home Secretary acknowledged in Parliament that 66 per cent of suspects had no ethnicity recorded – an omission that makes generalisations indefensible. The 2020 Home Office literature review reinforced this, finding that where ethnicity was noted, it was based on limited, non-representative samples. Of the 4,000 offenders studied, 42 per cent were White British, 17 per cent Black or Black British, 14 per cent Asian or Asian British, and 22 per cent unrecorded.
Those figures hardly support the notion of a single “dominant” group.
The problem, however, is not only statistical – it is moral. When commentators reduce abuse to ethnicity, they convert child protection into a culture war. They turn a safeguarding crisis into a political weapon. The victims – many of whom were failed by the state for decades – are again silenced as public debate shifts from accountability to accusation.
The idea of “Asian grooming gangs” first took hold through the Quilliam Foundation’s 2017 report, now widely discredited for its lack of transparency and methodological rigour. Yet its flawed claim – that 84 per cent of offenders were Asian – still circulates in political rhetoric. Singh’s more recent narrowing of this myth to “Pakistani Muslim men” marks an even more dangerous turn: the scapegoating of one nationality to explain a national failure.
The Casey Audit warns precisely against this misdirection. Local data cannot be used to define national patterns, it notes, because policing and reporting practices differ widely across regions. In other words, the headline figures that fuel tabloid outrage are drawn from fragmented, localised samples. But nuance seldom trends. Outrage sells better than accuracy.
This lazy generalisation has tangible human costs. British Pakistanis, who make up roughly 2 per cent of the population, already face heightened scrutiny and Islamophobia. Linking an entire community to sexual violence deepens social divides, fosters suspicion, and erodes cooperation between police and communities – the very cooperation needed to prevent abuse. Experts such as Dr Ella Cockbain have repeatedly shown that racialised framing of child sexual exploitation distorts safeguarding policy and makes victims less likely to come forward.
It is worth remembering that Pakistan itself has condemned all forms of child abuse and exploitation. Most of the individuals convicted in these UK cases are British citizens, not Pakistani nationals. Yet when headlines emphasise “Pakistani Muslim men,” they shift blame across borders – from institutional failure within Britain to an imagined foreign pathology. The result is both inaccurate and incendiary.
Britain’s new national inquiry into grooming gangs, announced after the Casey Audit, offers a way forward. Its recommendations – mandatory recording of suspect ethnicity, stronger victim-support systems, and clearer legal definitions – reflect what responsible reporting should emulate: precision, restraint and compassion.
The real story is not about Pakistani men. It is about systemic neglect, failed data collection, and a society too eager to assign guilt where it should demand governance. Until the conversation shifts from race to responsibility, Britain will keep mistaking scapegoats for solutions.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
