Offences against Children: Ethnic Groups

(asked on 12th May 2021) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of collecting ethnicity as part of child sexual abuse data.


Answered by
Victoria Atkins Portrait
Victoria Atkins
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
This question was answered on 17th May 2021

Child sexual abuse is an abhorrent crime and we will leave no stone unturned to prevent and pursue offenders, protect children and young people, and support victims and survivors from all backgrounds.

All police forces routinely collect data on recorded child sexual abuse offences, including offences related to indecent images of children. These figures are published quarterly by the Office for National statistics, and are broken down by offence types and police force areas. In the most recent data, published 13 May 2021, there were nearly 90,000 CSA offences recorded, an increase of nearly 300% since 2013. Crime in England and Wales - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)

The Government is clear that understanding possible drivers of crime is key to developing ways to prevent offending and better support victims. That is why the Home Secretary introduced a new requirement for police forces to collect ethnicity data for those arrested and held in custody as a result of their suspected involvement in group-based child sexual exploitation in March 2021. Complying with the requirement will be voluntary for one year to allow forces to update their systems, after which it will become mandatory. This follows the Government’s commitment in the Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Strategy (January 2021) to improve the quality of data collected on the characteristics of offenders.

Police forces have a duty to collect this data through the Annual Data Requirement (ADR) as set out in the Police Act 1996. The ADR is reviewed on an annual basis, and the Home Office will continue to consider data requirements in relation to child sexual abuse, ensuring that all proposals for new data collections are consulted on with the police to ensure that such requests are proportionate, and do not place unnecessary burdens on police forces.

Additionally the Government is constantly striving to better understand the nature of child sexual abuse through the work of the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, which it established in 2017, and the insight of other experts including the ONS and the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse, who have produced research on ethnic minority victims of CSEA.

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