Aisha K. Gill argues that London’s response to group-based child sexual exploitation should focus on improving evidence, identification, and protection for all victims rather than fixating on offender ethnicity.
For most of the last decade, the national conversation about grooming gangs has been derailed by a fight over perpetrator ethnicity. But before London can answer questions about who is committing these crimes, it must first confront a more basic question: who is being missed?
As I set out in my evidence to the London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee last week, the issue is not that we have the wrong ethnic story about group-based child sexual exploitation. It is that we do not have a reliable evidential picture of the scale, nature or distribution of the problem.
Consider the numbers London does have. Following Baroness Casey’s damning 2025 National Audit, the Metropolitan Police has been reviewing roughly 9,000 historic group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) cases from the last 15 years in which the outcome was ‘no further action’. By November 2025, 1,200 had been found within scope. Yet the Met’s current live caseload of complex group-based cases is described as only in the ‘tens’.
These are not the same pool: the 1,200 are historic cases being reviewed retrospectively; the ‘tens’ are cases actively being investigated now. The contrast raises serious questions about current identification, recording and investigative thresholds. With around 1.8 million children in London, even a rate of 1.3 per 1,000 suggests a substantial CSEA safeguarding burden, yet only a small number of complex group-based investigations appears to be live at any one time.
This paints a stark picture of possible under-identification, inconsistent categorisation and an operational as well as a recording deficit. In the words of Baroness Casey, national data on child sexual abuse and exploitation is ‘not good enough to support any statements about the ethnicity of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders at the national level’. Where Casey did identify a disproportionate number of Asian-heritage suspects in Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire, she was clear that these were local pictures drawn from local police data – not a national profile.
The earlier Children’s Commissioner’s 19-force inquiry identified 1,231 group-based perpetrators, of whom 42 per cent were White or White British, 17 per cent Black or Black British, 14 per cent Asian or Asian British, and 22 per cent recorded as ethnicity unknown. At Part One of the London Assembly’s hearings, investigative journalists were consistent: the capital’s offender profile reflects the capital’s diversity.
None of that lets any perpetrator, community or institution off the hook. But a national template based only on north-west England is deeply inadequate. My research into a decade of UK press coverage on grooming gangs documented how South Asian – and specifically Pakistani-heritage – men were constructed as ‘folk devils’. Since public narratives shape institutional attention, these constructions distorted what agencies noticed, recorded, investigated and prioritised. When we look for only one kind of offender, we stop seeing others.
The same logic applies to victims. This is London’s particular safeguarding failure: the victims most likely to be overlooked are those who do not fit the dominant public image of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse.
Black and racially minoritised girls face compounded barriers to disclosure: honour and shame; fears around modesty, shame and family reputation; fear of disbelief; language barriers; and non-recognition of abuse as sexual violence. British South Asian boys are silenced by the same architecture of shame, layered with gendered expectations of masculinity. Disabled children, LGBTQ+ children, children affected by immigration control, and children criminalised before they are recognised as exploited are chronically undercounted. So are the roughly 9,000 to 10,000 looked-after children on London’s local authority caseloads.
London’s exploitation environment is also structurally unique: perpetrators and victims can move easily across borough boundaries, police command areas, school catchments and care placements. Prevention that relies only on place-based surveillance or visible street-based indicators will fail to see what is actually happening.
In light of these complexities, what should the Mayor, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) and the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) do differently? Four things, in order of urgency.
First, close the accountability gap. There is a documented discrepancy between public statements about the absence of grooming gangs in London and the Met’s submission of hundreds of cases to the Home Office. MOPAC should commission an independent audit of what was known, when it was known, how it was categorised and what action followed, with the transparency of the Jay Inquiry and the Casey Audit as the benchmark.
Second, count properly. Implement Casey Recommendation 4, accepted by the government in June 2025, and make ethnicity, nationality, sex, age, care status and offending context mandatory fields in every child sexual exploitation and abuse record. Publish the methodology underpinning the apparent discrepancy between the Met’s recorded rate of 2.77 contact child sexual abuse offences per 1,000 children and London boroughs’ rate of 1.79 child sexual abuse social care assessments per 1,000 children. Build a single London-wide dataset that policing, local authorities, health and specialist services can all draw from.
Third, resource the specialists. MOPAC’s reported £5.7 million reduction to child sexual exploitation-related budget lines is incompatible with London’s position as an initial local investigation area in the statutory Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs. Reinstate that funding, and ring-fence support for specialist ‘by and for’ services that hold the trust of communities the statutory system has repeatedly failed.
Fourth, measure the right things. Attrition, charge, conviction, survivor satisfaction and safeguarding outcomes matter more than training-attendance figures. Commit to adopting the Victims and Survivors Charter, once published by Baroness Longfield as the minimum standard for every MPS interaction with a group-based CSEA survivor.
London does not need a response that is politically defensive or racially reductive. It needs one that is accurate, transparent, evidence-led and child-centred. That begins with naming the abuse clearly, counting the children honestly – and being willing to see every child.
Aisha K. Gill is Professor of Criminology at the University of Bristol, Head of Centre for Gender and Violence Research and Co-Editor of the Journal of Gender Based Violence.
Gender-based corruption: an exploration of sexual corruption in migration contexts in the UK by Megan Isaac and Aisha K. is available to read open access in the Journal of Gender-Based Violence on Bristol University Press Digital here.
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