Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Since the police in England first started investigating child sexual grooming gangs in the late 2000s, offending has evolved.Much of the criminality has moved online, while gangs now often co-opt victims into drug-running and fraud. Increasingly, groups of children are also abusing other children, while one in four victims of child sexual exploitation are boys. “What we really need to be acknowledging is anybody can be a victim and anybody can be a perpetrator,” said James Simmonds-Read, national programme manager at the Children’s Society.The issue has re-emerged into public consciousness in the past two weeks after Elon Musk highlighted the scandal, upending the UK government’s political agenda and leading to calls for a fresh national inquiry. Official understanding has become more sophisticated since the first gang trials 15 years ago, but remains incomplete. In 2023, there were 4,428 reported offline sexual offences carried out by groups, according to official data for England and Wales published in November, the first time a detailed breakdown has been made available.These accounted for 3.7 per cent of all child sexual abuse crimes. Of these offences, grooming gangs — organised networks of criminals who target children — accounted for 17 per cent, or 717 crimes. Such gangs are still therefore a threat, said Richard Fewkes, director of the national Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce, even if they are a “very small” proportion of overall sex offences against children. “We know it’s happening and our data tells us it’s happening,” he added. Ever since the grooming gangs were first tried, the topic of ethnicity has loomed large because of the British Pakistani profile of many perpetrators at the time. Inquiries have repeatedly recommended the better collection of ethnicity data.November’s figures, the first of their kind, show 83 per cent of offenders operating as part of a group were white, with the figure at 70 per cent among grooming gangs specifically. The exact ethnicity for non-white gangs is not published, while the data itself remains very limited: only a third of suspects had their ethnicity recorded.It is estimated that about 7 per cent of grooming suspects in 2023 were of Pakistani heritage, said Fewkes. British Pakistanis comprise 2.7 per cent of the population in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics, although that picture varies significantly from place to place.The lack of historical ethnicity data makes it hard to say whether the proportion of gangs featuring British-Pakistani men has changed in recent years. Fewkes concedes that British-Pakistani men may be over-represented within gang grooming cases, but is concerned that too much focus on them may deter victims of crimes by other perpetrators from coming forward, for fear they will not be believed. “Because the focus is on a small cohort, the impact that has on victims and survivors is massive,” he said. “If you’re somebody who’s thinking about disclosing . . . and all you’re hearing is this issue is about Asian grooming gangs, that has an impact on you.” Simmonds-Read, from the Children’s Society, called the focus on the threat of gangs of Pakistani men abusing white girls an “unhelpful red herring”.The data also points to bigger threats than organised gangs. The largest proportion of group child abuse remains in the home, perpetrated by relatives and family friends, which accounted for 1,125 group-based crimes. Nearly half the suspects in group child abuse cases were other children, meanwhile, with more than one in three aged between 10 and 15. It is an area currently being researched further. These days it is also “very, very rare” for children to only experience one form of exploitation, Simmonds-Read added. “Children are sexually abused while being criminally exploited to move drugs,” he said.“We are seeing cases of children being taken to hotels and being sexually abused in the hotel and afterwards being taken and exploited for fraud and money laundering.”That can then complicate investigations, he said, with agencies sometimes overlooking any sexual aspect of the abuse. Despite having a clearer picture than a decade ago, officials admit authorities have been slow to compile a picture of child sexual exploitation in the UK.Cases in towns such as Rochdale and Rotherham eventually helped to trigger the national Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which three years ago devoted a report specifically to abuse by networks of offenders. Its conclusions were damning for British police: forces still did not have an understanding of what was happening in their areas. While data is now being collected, some remain unsatisfied. Maggie Oliver, the former Greater Manchester Police detective who blew the whistle on the force’s failure to investigate the Rochdale grooming scandal, now runs a foundation devoted to helping victims secure justice.It will take “years” for the data to become meaningful, she said, while it is still not necessarily capturing all it needs to. Authorities remain squeamish about formally identifying the ethnicity of criminals, she said, with official data too patchy to allow for a facts-based discussion. “What we urgently need is routine and mandatory recording of data of ethnicity and occupation of offenders,” said Oliver.“Without the data, we push the conversation into the realms of propaganda and speculation, which helps nobody.”Victims are also not always girls, agencies point out. More than one in five of those targets by groups of abusers in 2023 were boys. As their understanding of child sexual exploitation — including grooming gangs — has grown, police are increasingly deploying the kind of approaches once associated with serious organised crime and major murder inquiries, said Fewkes, including covert tactics. In some areas, there has also been a tightening of regulations around the taxi trade, although experts admit the work is patchy. In the gang trials of the 2010s, in many cases criminals had been abusing vulnerable children through networks of taxis and takeaways.Agencies are also trying to keep up with emerging technological threats. In its annual profile of child sexual exploitation for 2022-23, South Yorkshire Police, which includes Rotherham, noted that national reports of online grooming had risen 80 per cent nationally in the previous four years.It also pointed to concerns from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children that the use of online virtual reality spaces may emerge as a tool for organised abuse in years to come. It warned online mental health forums “may be a particular target for potential suspects who seek to exploit a particular vulnerability of a child”.Former detective Oliver said her charity had seen an increase in the use of Snapchat, “which makes the perpetrators difficult to track”. Simmonds-Read pointed to the national Makesafe operation, a joint initiative between police and the hotel trade, as an example of current work to disrupt abusers. However, he said, modern technology was posing a risk there, too.“There’s a growing move towards contactless check-ins,” he said. “People are able to go into rooms with children and the only way you can pick that up is on CCTV.” Despite progress, child protection experts agree the area remains underfunded, responses geographically patchy, data in its infancy and criminals adaptive.On-street gang abuse of vulnerable children is “very much still occurring”, said Oliver.“But criminals are so much more sophisticated now in terms of their methodology,” she said, while “agencies are over stretched and under resourced”. Data visualisation by Amy Borrett
