What’s the truth about the Telford grooming gangs?

More than 1,000 girls were sexually exploited in Telford over several decades. The details in the report, published this week, on what happened in the Shropshire town make for harrowing reading. But there’s a curious omission in the way its author Tom Crowther QC refers to the perpetrators of these terrible crimes. 

The majority of the men responsible, we are told, ‘were men of southern Asian heritage’. But is this specific enough? Surely the men who groomed and raped so many vulnerable young girls while social services, schools and police turned a blind eye, cannot just be defined by an enormous geographical area comprehending two billion people?

When Sajid Javid was home secretary, he commissioned a study, drilling down into the background of grooming gangs to find out more detail, noting that many of the perpetrators were of Pakistani ethnicity. The report subsequently found that there was a ‘lack of evidence’ for any ethnic link to grooming gangs, and there is not much more evidence in Crowther’s report to suggest there is one either. 

Crowther admits he is ‘cautious not to infer too much from names, which may indicate wider geographical background and indeed religious heritage, but are wholly unreliable indicators of national background and (in particular) religious belief’.