Senior Labour MP Diane Abott has used misinformation that was recently debunked by the Home Office to support her claims of “deliberate misinformation and nonsense” surrounding child sex abuse by grooming gangs. The ex-Shadow Home Secretary said “the facts are very different” to the “nonsense and deliberate misinformation” about child sex abuse spouted by “some media and some politicians”.
But the “facts” she referred to – that 88% of convicted child sex offenders are white – had been denounced as “completely inadequate” by the Labour government just hours before. The figures were criticised for not specifying group-based child sex offences, as carried out by “grooming gangs”. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told MPs on Monday: “I warned in January that the data collection we inherited from the previous Government on ethnicity was completely inadequate; the data was collected on only 37% of suspects.”
A report from Baroness Louise Casey on the grooming gangs scandal, published on Monday, found that the ethnicity of offenders had been “shied away from”, with data not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.
“Baroness Casey’s audit confirms that ethnicity data is not recorded for two thirds of grooming gang perpetrators, and that the data is ‘not good enough’ to support any statements about the ethnicity of group-based child sexual exploitation at the national level,” Ms Cooper said.
The Prime Minister said a full probe would be implemented into the scandal after the report was published, following months of resistance and insistence that the government’s focus was on implementing the recommendations already made in a seven-year national inquiry by Professor Alexis Jay.
The report detailed how victims were unable to lead normal lives, with some unable to open bank accounts because of criminal convictions from when they were being groomed as children.
Others told Baroness Casey they were assured the perpetrators would be arrested and charged, only to never see them face justice, and criticised those in power who had shielded the abuse “with no accountability for their actions”.
“I can’t verify every single thing these women told me, but I believe them, and one thing is abundantly clear; we as a society owe these women a debt,” she said.
“They should never have been allowed to suffer the appalling abuse and violence they went through ass children.
“This is especially so for those who were in the ‘care’ of their local authorities, where the duty to protect them was left in the hands of professionals on the state’s behalf.”