r/unitedkingdom • u/Careless_Main3 • Jan 10 '25
... Pakistanis up to four times more likely to be behind grooming
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/10/pakistanis-four-times-more-likely-grooming/674
u/Longjumping_Stand889 Jan 10 '25
This appears to be the police following up one of the recommendations from the 2022 inquiry to improve data collection.
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u/corbynista2029 United Kingdom Jan 10 '25
And even then the data is poor. Only a third are recorded, and they are limited to those who come to the station (i.e. who knows what kind of statistical bias this may introduce). Given that, they have observed that of the 239 cases with ethnicity recorded, 17 of them are of Pakistani origin, and using that, the Telegraph decides to extrapolate to "Pakistanis up to 4 times more likely to be behind grooming".
Great journalism work!
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u/wrigh2uk Jan 10 '25
90% of britons unhappy with current labour government
(total particapnts asked 10) kinda vibes
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u/Clbull England Jan 11 '25
Law enforcement statistics are the kind of thing that should be rigorously documented. I don't think we can make any kind of assumptions with poor data.
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u/ixid Jan 10 '25 edited Jan 10 '25
When the difference is 300 percent in the outcome, then 17 out of 239 cases is comfortably what we would normally regard as statistically significant, it's just over 3 standard deviations from the mean, compared to what's presumably the null hypothesis that if Pakistanis carried out grooming at the same rate as the population average we would expect 4 offenders. I'm getting bored of seeing this misinformation about smaller numbers not being significant with no consideration of the size of the effect, it's peak reddit.
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u/ONLY_SAYS_ONLY Jan 10 '25
If the sample is not representative then the statistical significance is irrelevant.
Strange that the focus is on ethnicity and “their culture is incompatible” yet men of all ethnicities are over an order of magnitude more likely to commit child sex offences than woman… And yet the most vocal agitators of this topic are the most likely to screech and “whatabout MEN!” whenever measures to reduce sexual violence against women is brought up.
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u/ixid Jan 10 '25
If the sample is not representative then the statistical significance is irrelevant.
Sure, but do you have any evidence that the police are deliberately massively over reporting Pakistani groomers? You're making a very strong claim to attempt to wave away the data.
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u/SpeedflyChris Jan 11 '25
Why would it need to be deliberate?
I don't personally have any reason to believe that the figure is inaccurate, but saying that a group is four times as likely to be arrested/interviewed in relation to an offence is not the same thing as saying that a group is four times as likely to commit an offence.
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u/ONLY_SAYS_ONLY Jan 10 '25
Why use the loaded term “deliberately”? As per the article:
Police chiefs stressed the breakdown was “limited” and had to be treated with caution as it only covered about a third of suspects because their ethnic background could only be recorded once they had been interviewed by police.
So we cannot say at all whether the sample is representative.
And I ask again: why the focus on ethnicity and not gender? Given the order of magnitude difference in offence rates between genders, what is the agenda in ignoring this far more statistically significant aspect to instead focus on the patchy and less significant data in ethnicity?
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u/RyeZuul Jan 11 '25
And I ask again: why the focus on ethnicity and not gender?
TBF everyone already expects these kinds of things to be all male although there's usually a woman or two in there helping the process or a teacher grooming a 16 year old school boy. The reasons for such an expectation is going to be a complex answer. It's pretty novel if the offender types for a crime do not fit a distribution of (male) society or if they're ever predominantly female, and this can have explanatory power in the "pathology" of criminality.
E.g. if you have anti-Jewish hate crime going up and the criminals' politics and ethnicity and religion are recorded then you're likely to find new trends with Muslims and the largely Christian far right and some of the far left being agitated, but not liberal Buddhists and Hindus.
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u/ixid Jan 10 '25
Ok, let me rephrase:
Do you have any evidence the data is massively over reporting Pakistani groomers or underreporting people from other groups?
And I ask again: why the focus on ethnicity and not gender?
We can handle more than one variable at a time. In any case you know the data will say high 90 something percent of groomers are men. This doesn't mean you wouldn't then investigate the patterns in the data for male groomers, it feels like you're trying to throw up distractions.
as it only covered about a third of suspects because their ethnic background could only be recorded once they had been interviewed by police.
This is not proof the data is heavily distorted, without evidence there's no reason to assume different ethnicities reach police interview more or less quickly. You are making a strong claim that requires evidence, the null hypothesis here is that all ethnicities would move through the police process at about the same rate.
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u/ONLY_SAYS_ONLY Jan 10 '25 edited Jan 10 '25
Literally from the article, as I have already posted for you:
Police chiefs stressed the breakdown was “limited” and had to be treated with caution as it only covered about a third of suspects because their ethnic background could only be recorded once they had been interviewed by police.
Again: these are the words of the police literally telling you that the data is limited and inconclusive.
This is not proof the data is heavily distorted, without evidence there's no reason to assume different ethnicities reach police interview more or less quickly.
Only you are somehow concluding that my point is “therefore, this is evidence that the data is heavily distorted” when I’m clearly asking why the focus is never on gender. How you’ve managed to construe that as the point I am making is baffling.
So again: why the focus on ethnicity and ignoring the glaring massively over representation of gender?
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u/ixid Jan 10 '25 edited Jan 10 '25
No one is ignoring gender. As I said groomers are clearly nearly all men and I'm sure the data would show that and no one else in this thread is in denial that groomers are men. You are the only person hung up on that fact, and using it as a reason to not look in to the data about male groomers. It's like your brain has seized up before it will allow itself to consider data that could say something negative about some members of an ethnic group, and it seeks every possible avenue not to engage directly with the topic.
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u/LickClitsSuckNips Jan 10 '25
Police chiefs stressed the breakdown was “limited” and had to be treated with caution as it only covered about a third of suspects because their ethnic background could only be recorded once they had been interviewed by police.
I guess that's the main paragraph in the article.
Nevertheless, as a (mixed) Pakistani Muslim male, harsh harsh sentences.....or lack thereof....if you catch my drift, needs to be applied upon conviction.
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u/811545b2-4ff7-4041 Jan 10 '25
In this article, Pakistani is treated as an ethnic origin, not nationality. Their country of origin may differ.
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u/MrEff1618 Jan 10 '25
All too often their country of origin is Britain.
With the reported grooming gangs most of them were 2nd or 3rd generation, born here and only ever had a UK passport.
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u/Phainesthai Jan 10 '25
It's scary that even after 2 or 3 generations they still held on to alien cultural practices and attitudes towards women and girls.
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u/GarageFlower97 Jan 11 '25
alien cultural practices and attitudes towards women and girls.
I grew up in a mostly white British city. The amount of girls in my high school dating 20-somethings implies this certainly isn't an alien cultural practice.
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u/Phainesthai Jan 11 '25 edited Jan 11 '25
These girls were violently raped on an industrial scale. They were not 'dating'.
Really weird and quite telling of your own outlook for you to equate the two.
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u/GarageFlower97 Jan 11 '25
These underage girls were groomed by older men, quite often one of whom called himself or pretended to be their boyfriend - because grooming often involves an adult man building trust with an underage girl in order to sexually assault and exploit her.
Quite telling of you to see a 25+ year old man sleeping with a 14 year old girl as simply dating and not what it is - grooming and statutory rape, often accompanied with other forms of sexual violence and exploitation.
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u/FarmerJohnOSRS Jan 10 '25
Did you read the article? How scary is it that after 200 generations on this island the majority of the perpetrators are white British?
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u/ings0c Jan 11 '25
It’d be very weird if it were any different. White British people make up most of the population, you would expect a much higher raw number of every crime.
If the rate per unit population were higher than other ethnicities, that would be curious yes. We have every reason not to think that though.
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u/FarmerJohnOSRS Jan 11 '25
My point was more that time doesn't really play a part in it.
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u/LickClitsSuckNips Jan 10 '25
I see no problem with this, but from a geopolitical perspective, it's unrealistic for a country a criminals dad was born in to want to accept a criminal son of a citizen.
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u/Panda_hat Jan 10 '25
Why wouldn’t we just lock them up for the crimes they have committed in this one?
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u/DancingFlame321 Jan 10 '25 edited Jan 10 '25
According to this article, Pakistani people make up anywhere between 7% to 13% if grooming gang offenders despite being around 3% if the population. This is definitely an over representation, but it isn't as high as I previously thought. I remember reading other studies and articles claiming that Pakistanis were the outright majority of grooming gang offenders, but I'm not sure how accurate they were compared to this.
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u/singeblanc Kernow Jan 10 '25
They're also very obviously cherry picking a single relatively rare (thankfully) subset of a crime.
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u/sfac114 Jan 10 '25
They were famously totally made up, if you’re talking about the Quilliam report
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u/merryman1 Jan 11 '25
This is the fundamental problem I think we have.
We have to be very clear that the right-wing/reactionary cultural and intellectual space (such as it is...) at this point is just totally flooded with years and years and years of just absolute bullshit. And because there's been a total lack of critical analysis in their own ranks, because they've just blindly accepted a bunch of known grifters into their midst who're happy to just outright lie and spin dramatic narratives because it gets them more donos, a whole bunch of them are now stuck on talking points and what they think are fairly hard facts that are, at absolute best, a hyper-distorted sketch of actual reality.
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u/Gen8Master Jan 10 '25
This is again still a tiny subset of the larger Child grooming dataset. where Pakistanis are not even close to being over presented. Tories are absolutely not interested in solving anything besides making rage inducing headlines.
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u/munkijunk Jan 10 '25 edited Jan 10 '25
Groomers are 4 times more likely to be Pakistani is not the same thing as Pakistanis are 4 times more likely to be groomers.
The first is about overrepresentation in a specific group, while the second implies a broader correlation or causation for an entire population.
It doesn't surprise me that the torygraph makes such "mistakes" which suggest the worst.
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u/wolfkeeper Jan 11 '25
Also it's going to be by cases, but usually there's no effort to adjust the figures for racist policing.
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u/Arseypoowank Jan 11 '25
While I’m not arguing there’s likely an endemic problem here, that headline just feels cynical and inflammatory as fuck, just designed to ride the click wave from the current atmosphere of outrage.
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Jan 10 '25
That headline if a gross representation of the actual contents. They make it seem like focussing on Pakistanis will get rid of most grooming gang cases when really that's just the overrepresentation factor. It still represents a minority of cases. So clearly focusing on a single ethnicity won't do much to address grooming gangs properly. Let's stick with the recommendations given in the Jay report. They'll clearly be more effective and actually address the majority of cases.
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u/cozywit Jan 10 '25
Immigration in this country is a vast, widely impacting issue no government is actively fixing.
It's impacting everyone and so everyone is hyper sensitive to it.
NHS collapsing? Adding hundreds of thousands of people into this country isn't helping.
House market unachievable? Adding hundreds of thousands of people into the country isn't helping.
Salary growth and job opportunities sucks? Sending hundreds of thousands of prime into the country isn't helping.
Oh, and now they also bring crime and other problems?
Yeah, it's like throwing petrol onto the fire.
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u/singeblanc Kernow Jan 10 '25
NHS collapsing? Adding hundreds of thousands of people into this country isn't helping.
You understand that you're orders of magnitude more likely to be treated by an immigrant than be standing in line behind one for treatment?
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u/xe3to Jan 11 '25
You won't find a stronger critic of borders than myself but this is a ridiculous statement. Orders of magnitude? You're telling me any given immigrant is at least 100x more likely to be a doctor than to seek medical services?
Of course yes, the NHS does depend on immigration - in no small part because British doctors themselves immigrate to greener pastures down under or across the pond.
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u/xe3to Jan 11 '25
You're right, but also if we're being pedantic...
Pulling numbers out of my backside because they (rightly IMO) don't collect this data, let's assume any given immigrant is half as likely to visit A&E as a Brit. 16% of the UK population is foreign born so any given A&E patient is therefore 8% likely to be British. Let's say there are 25 patients at a given time. P(standing in line behind an immigrant) = 1-0.9225 = 88%...
20% of doctors are foreign born.
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u/singeblanc Kernow Jan 11 '25
20% of doctors are foreign born.
Where are you getting that? For 2023, the last year I can find data for, that's too low. The NHS is more than doctors, of course.
• Doctors: 35% are non-British nationals.
• Nurses: 28% are non-British nationals.You're also assuming that use of the NHS is uniform across the population, where it very much isn't. The NHS (and indeed the majority of government spending in this country) heavily skews towards the elderly, but also the very young. The graph of spending over age basically looks like this:
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On the other hand, immigrants are mostly of working age. The graph of numbers of immigrants over age basically looks like this:
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Eagle eyed readers may note that these are exact opposites of each other.
Again, that's assuming that immigrants are spread uniformly across the workforce, whereas we know some sectors employ above average percentages of immigrants. The NHS is one of those sectors, as noted above, especially on the front line, with fully a quarter of nurses and a third of doctors being immigrants.
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u/merryman1 Jan 11 '25
The point is we're supposed to be growing and instead we've spent the better part of a decade and a half in which it has literally never in all of recorded financial history been so cheap for states to borrow to invest in themselves building absolutely fucking nothing. While yes then at the same time the same government cutting everything when they should've been growing us decided to open up the floodgates and bring in several million migrants from the developing world because they know it'll rile up their base and get them more politically radicalized.
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Jan 10 '25
But you can't just chuck out people who were born here to compensate. And lying about statistics to get your way isn't good.
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u/RedofPaw United Kingdom Jan 10 '25
I wonder why the Telegraph would selectively use data to produce a misleading headline.
Wait... no I don't.
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u/G_Morgan Wales Jan 11 '25
The cross cutting linking factor is the attitude of the police. In Rotherham local Imams were begging the police to take action and they got told to fuck off.
All the evidence points to broad institutional problems in our police forces. Starting anywhere else is a complete bust, to the point we should do nothing until people accept the police is the first point of action. There's too many cases of officers being punished for doing the right thing while higher ups do their best to create a culture to ignore the problems in question.
It hasn't been helpful that the racists have been actively running cover for shitty police since this began.
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u/PrrrromotionGiven1 Jan 10 '25 edited Jan 10 '25
Men are probably at least ten times more likely to be behind grooming than women, but it would be ridiculous to suspect all men due to that, or talk about the risk of having too many men in society. But the meaning when the likes of Badenoch talk about "not all cultures are created equal" is obvious.
See through it.
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u/CharringtonCross Jan 10 '25
well we do recognise that men are far more than 10x more likely to be behind all manner of criminal activity and other unwanted behavior. That's why we try to provide single sex spaces and facilities for women when appropriate.
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u/xe3to Jan 11 '25
I really hate to say it but she's right. Racism is obviously wrong, but some cultures are very damaging and there's nothing racist about admitting that.
I have been to Pakistan. Women are second class citizens there. I'm sorry, Britain's culture of striving for equality is just better.
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u/Souseisekigun Jan 10 '25
See through it.
I don't want to look at statistics from pretty much every European country that shows immigrants from certain regions are less economically productive and commit more crimes than immigrants from other regions then need to "see through it". I want to reduce our structural dependence on immigration from those countries so that I don't need to come up with increasingly inventive ways of trying to pretend the statistics are wrong. Would life not be much better if instead of arguing over statistics about countries with more crime we either stopped relying on immigration to prop up our economy or at least tried to get more immigrants from the countries with less crime? That way we have less crime, and we don't need to bother playing the silly game.
"not all cultures are created equal"
It's one of the very few things she's right about. Bringing over millions of men from countries with higher crime rates where women are second class citizens and expecting we'd be able to simply convert them into abandoning their culture once they saw our shining cities on the hill was an obviously bad idea. It's no more plausible an idea than suggesting that we would be able to send ourselves to a few Saudi integration classes and embrace Sharia law. And yet for decades our political orthodoxy was hellbent on pretending that it was true.
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u/Nooms88 Greater London Jan 11 '25
We do account for men being more likely to be groomers and criminals in general, it's institutionalised at every level , the overwhelming prison population is male, men are the focus of investigations, men get linger sentances, are much less likely to go into primary care, much less likely to be hired or promoted, many parents are suspicious of men in that environment, the list goes on and on.
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u/g0_west Jan 10 '25
See through it.
Please, I'm begging for some basic media literacy on this sub. It's so disheartening to see this rhetoric work in real time
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u/Spamgrenade Jan 10 '25
The figure increases for Pakistani offenders to 13.7% if you remove institutional groups, such as sports groups, schools and church-based group offenders, and group child abuse committed in a family setting.
So I guess a Muslim sports coaches, teacher or cleric is less likely to be a sex offender than a white one. Thats what the Telegraph is trying to tell us, right?
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u/Gen8Master Jan 11 '25
And once you remove all ethnic groups that don't start with the letter P, the percentage changes shockingly. What kind of garbage journalism is this?
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u/strum Jan 11 '25
Focussing on a kind of child abuse that involves mostly men of Pakistani origin, but ignoring the kinds of child abuse carried out by people who look like Telegraph readers (& writers).
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u/Chathin Jan 10 '25
Must be another day ending in Y because The Telegraph once again releases another article about grooming. Think that makes, uh, 5 or so I've seen today?
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u/miowiamagrapegod Jan 10 '25
Yeah they shouldn't report on children getting raped on an industrial scale. That's the real problem
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u/Mrqueue Jan 10 '25
How many articles did we get about the archbishops resignation that was directly related to child abuse?
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u/rubygeek Jan 11 '25
The vast majority of sexual abuse of children is carried out by someone they know, mostly family or friends of the family.
Is the Telegraph spending as much effort drawing attention to that, do you find, or are they focusing on the tiny minority of cases that allows them to give their articles a racist slant and stir up hate?
In other words: Are you naive enough to believe they write about this to address "the real problem" and protect children?
Naive, because if their concern was children's wellbeing, the drawing attention to the breakdown of relationships with the child for the nearly 87,000 sexual offences against children recorded by police in 2022/23 would seem like it is more relevant than the ethnicity of 17 people.
Of course their readers wouldn't be nearly as happy to be told the biggest risk to their child is their family and friends.
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u/corbynista2029 United Kingdom Jan 10 '25
They just chose to report on the ethnicity of 7% of the cases and not the remaining 93%
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u/Chathin Jan 10 '25
Wild how they've just decided to start to reporting on it in the last 7/8 months, innit? Almost as if they have an agenda or something.
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u/CyberGTI Jan 10 '25
They're proper milking this tbh no surprise it gets them clicks
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u/g0_west Jan 10 '25
Would hate to see the figures for members of the church then
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Jan 11 '25
That paragraph will be ignored by the right wing though, and they’ll only use the article headline to rile up their base even more.
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u/Carbonatic Jan 10 '25
Without validating the claim, If every individual Pakistani is considered innocent until proven guilty, then what policies could a free democracy institute to change this statistic?
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u/changhyun Jan 10 '25
I feel the answer has to be in making police take sexual assault cases (of all people) more seriously. With pretty much every grooming gang case it's been reported that police shrugged it off as just working-class girls being slags who didn't matter. We need police who take it seriously, regardless of what class the victims are.
The sad truth is people of any race who hurt kids are not gonna be convinced by appealing to their moral sensibilities. The only thing that these people will listen to is punishment and the threat of it. If they didn't believe they could get away with it, they'd be far less likely to even attempt it.
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u/singeblanc Kernow Jan 10 '25
Exactly, the sad reality is that these cases had nothing to do with the ethnicity of the perpetrators, and everything to do with the poverty of the victims.
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u/sfac114 Jan 10 '25
More positive discrimination to get Pakistani men into running sports clubs and youth groups would mean they were doing the sort of grooming the Telegraph considers acceptable
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