Originally Posted by Aisha K Gill and Karen Harrison
The current moral panic about South Asian sex offenders, driven by British newspaper reporting, significantly affects public perception of the problem and of what policy responses are appropriate. Construing South Asian men as dangerous sex offenders harnesses the protective role of the British State as a reformed patriarchy seeking to rescue white women from deviant and abusive minority ethnic men.
All of the newspaper articles explored in this study underscored that the victims in the recent high‐profile cases of street grooming were white, while the majority of the perpetrators were of South Asian origin or descent. South Asian street grooming gangs received disproportionate coverage at the expense of other, similar cases involving mostly white perpetrators and/or ethnic minority victims. Skewed media reporting fuelled a moral panic linking ethnicity and child sexual exploitation. Over‐reporting cases of South Asian men as perpetrators of grooming and sexual exploitation of white girls overlooks broader statistics and socioeconomic factors such as poverty and neglect, which often lie at the root of sexual exploitation. Research by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (2011) about children who were groomed and sexually exploited by an offender they first met in a public place identified 1,217 offenders: 30 per cent were white, while 28 per cent were Asian (11 were Bangladeshi, 45 were Pakistani and 290 were described as ‘Asian Other’). Of their 2083 victims, 61 per cent were white, while just 3 per cent were Asian and 33 per cent were referred to as ‘other’. The report stressed that national conclusions about ethnicity cannot be drawn from the data, because much of the data came from a limited number of geographic areas (Cockbain and Brayley 2012). When the Office of the Children’s Commissioner published Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitationin Gangs and Groups the following year, it found that the vast majority of perpetrators were men, though a wide age‐range was uncovered: some offenders were as young as fourteen, while others were elderly. Critically, perpetrators and their victims were ethnically diverse. While some women’s groups in the UK have suggested that concern over South Asian sex offenders constitutes a ‘good’ moral panic, raising awareness to protect girls from abuse, many also recognise that it distorts public perception of the prevalence of the problemacross British society. More needs to be done to combat the full scope of child sexual exploitation and grooming cases, accounting for all potential perpetrators and victims. Raising moral outrage over this issue is a matter of priority, but should be achieved without recourse to racial stereotyping, helpful to no one lest future victims.
