Online predators present the “fastest growing” sexual abuse threat toward British children, the police in Britain said on Wednesday.
In an annual report on child sexual abuse and exploitation, the police also warned that a focus on the so-called “grooming gangs” scandal in Britain risked obscuring the prevalence of other forms of abuse, which make up the vast majority of sexual offenses against children.
The grooming gangs scandal unfolded more than a decade ago, when it emerged that groups of men, many of them of Pakistani heritage, had been exploiting and raping vulnerable girls in several towns and cities in Britain, and that the authorities had failed to protect victims and properly investigate their abusers. Numerous criminal prosecutions and inquiries have taken place but the crimes were brought to renewed international attention in January by Elon Musk, in a series of vitriolic and inaccurate tirades on X.
Richard Fewkes, director of Britain’s national child sexual exploitation taskforce, acknowledged the threat posed by grooming gangs, while expressing concern about the intense public attention on the issue as opposed to other, more common forms of child abuse.
“If you were a member of the public, you would actually think that grooming gangs is the biggest threat to children in our country today,” Mr. Fewkes told a news conference in London. “It is a threat, we know it’s a threat, and we’re very robust in terms of our response to that. But in the overall statistics, that particular typology of offending represents just over one half of a percent of offending.”
The new report, which analyzed almost 123,000 child sexual abuse and exploitation offenses recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2024, found that the total number of offenses had risen by 6 percent from the previous year. At least 42 percent had an “online element,” up by 26 percent compared to 2023. That included children being coerced or deceived into sharing sexual images of themselves, blackmailed into committing extreme acts, or having their abuse live streamed for profit. The police called on technology companies to do more to stop children viewing violent and explicit content, and to prevent their platforms from being used to groom and extort young victims.
Two-thirds of offenses involved physical contact. Only 3.6 percent of offenses were classed by the police as “group-based contact offending,” meaning they were committed by two or more people, and of that fraction, less than one-fifth were committed by “grooming gangs.”
That abuse type, officially known as child sexual exploitation, was less common in the police data than group abuse committed within families or by children abusing other children, while pedophile networks were also found to be operating within institutions such as schools, churches and children’s homes.
“The narrative is ‘rape gangs’ roaming the streets, targeting girls,” Mr. Fewkes said. “That does happen, but the majority of the crimes that are committed against children are done by people that they know.”
He said that police had to respond to “the whole threat” from child sexual abuse, “and not just the major headlines that we hear publicly at the moment.”
The report was released in the same week that the British government announced details of an upcoming independent national inquiry into grooming gangs, which it said would look at “serious failures” to protect girls by the police, local government, social services and other agencies, as well as allegations of “cover-ups” and the question of whether the response to the abuse was affected by “ethnicity, religion and cultural factors.”
A previous official report, published in June, said that men of Asian and Pakistani ethnicity were “disproportionately represented” among grooming gangs in three areas of England examined, but that the available data was “not sufficient to allow any conclusions to be drawn at the national level.”
The police analysis released this week showed that “self-defined ethnicity” was only recorded for 34 percent of both the suspected perpetrators and victims of child sexual abuse in 2024. Of the suspects, 87 percent were white British, compared to 74 percent of the population.
Shabana Mahmood, Britain’s home secretary, told Parliament on Tuesday that she would create a new law to “mandate the collection of good-quality ethnicity data,” which she wants the police to collect for all crimes.
“The best way to deal with suggestions of a conspiracy — people thinking that some communities are allowed to get away with certain types of behavior, or that the state does not wish to know the full facts of any case — is to have transparency,” she said.
Acting Chief Constable Becky Riggs, Britain’s national police lead for child abuse investigations, said different options were being considered to improve data collection on ethnicity but that the police were restricted by crime recording rules and debate over at what point in the investigation or prosecution data should be collected.
Ms. Riggs cautioned that the vast majority of child sexual abuse is believed to go unreported, particularly offenses committed by family members, and said officials were working to improve victims’ confidence in the criminal justice process to increase reporting.
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