Grooming Gangs

Stuart C McDonald Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP) [V]]

I thank the petitioners, and I thank the Petitions Committee for bringing this debate to the Chamber, as well as Members for making some very thoughtful and powerful contributions, many of which are based on years of experience in championing the rights of victims.

As the Home Office research we are debating states:

“Group-based CSE has been the subject of major investigations, attracting significant public concern and highlighting shocking state failures that have caused untold hurt to victims, their families and communities.”

That horrendous untold harm caused by these hideous crimes has been spread right across the towns and cities of the United Kingdom.

In relation to the specific petitions before us today, I will make three short points. First, research designed to provide a greater understanding of different types of offending behaviour is far from unusual. It can help inform policing and the wider Government response. The better we understand crime and criminals, the better, it is hoped, we can prevent these shocking crimes from happening in the first place, and that includes looking at what backgrounds offenders come from. All sorts of lessons can be learned not just for policing and criminal justice policy, but for wider social policy. However, as colleagues have rightly warned, great care must be taken in interpreting results and to prevent their being used by people who are determined to sow division, rather than to help victims.

We must also be careful that such research does not lead to counterproductive stereotypes. As the paper points out in relation to victims:

“Although awareness of vulnerability can be helpful, it can also contribute to stereotypes about what a victim of child sexual exploitation looks like, with the consequence that victims who differ from that picture are overlooked or unwilling to come forward in the belief that they will not be believed.”

In the same way, we should not fall into the trap of creating stereotypes of grooming gangs in case we fail to apprehend the ones that do not conform to it, or make it more difficult for their victims to feel confident about coming forward.

Secondly, on what the publication actually tells us, the review concludes that offenders are overwhelmingly male. There are some patterns for age and some limited patterns for social background. However, despite high-profile cases involving British Pakistani gangs, the fact is that there is no robust evidence on ethnicity:

“Based on the existing evidence…it seems most likely that the ethnicity of group-based CSE offenders is in line with CSA more generally and with the general population, with the majority of offenders being White.”

That is an important point, but as the report goes on to say

“this does not mean that cultural characteristics of offender groups are irrelevant or should be ignored by local agencies.”

Far from it: an approach to deterring, disrupting and preventing offending that recognises, acknowledges and takes account of the communities in which offending occurs is absolutely essential. We need such an approach, for example, to ensure all victims feel able to come forward and speak about what is happening to them, to identify suspicious patterns of behaviour or follow lines of inquiry, and to ask the questions that have to be asked and ask them of the right people. Too often in the past that just has not happened.

Thirdly, I hope the published report has been useful and has informed the new strategy. I do gently query with the Minister what exactly the Home Secretary seeks to achieve by apparently seeking yet more research on whether any particular group is over or under-represented among offenders, and how a more accurate picture can really be expected to emerge given the huge problems about reporting and classification. How will that change anything in Government strategy? Surely the most important point is that we have enough information to take action already, and the focus now must be on scrutiny of the new strategy—a welcome strategy—and of the co-ordinated and properly funded action that must follow in order to deliver justice.