‘You are focusing on Pakistani grooming gangs, because, probably, you’re racist.’ That’s what Emily Maitlis told ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe when he had the misfortune of appearing on the News Agents podcast yesterday. But is she right?
In fact, Pakistani men are up to five times as likely to be responsible for child sex grooming offences than the general population, according to figures from the Hydrant Programme, which investigates child sex abuse. Around one in 73 Muslim men over 16 have been prosecuted for ‘group-localised child sexual exploitation’ in Rotherham, research by academics from the universities of Reading and Chichester has revealed.
Lowe has highlighted these cases and is crowdfunding an inquiry into the grooming gang scandal. Yet his attempt to uncover the truth about the identity of the men involved appears to have upset Maitlis.
‘You are focusing on Pakistani grooming gangs, because, probably, you’re racist’
‘Two-hundred-and-twenty-four white grooming gang suspects were found compared to 22 Pakistani suspects…Those are police statistics from the Times,’ she told Lowe.
Maitlis’s figures come from Hydrant, too – she’s just chosen to use the absolute numbers, rather than the relative ones. Pakistanis are a small proportion of Britain’s population, and yet are well represented in these sex abuse figures. They make up 2.7 per cent of the population, but in the first nine months of 2024 accounted for 13.7 per cent of grooming suspects.
In the report that Maitlis appears to have read, Hydrant references a much broader definition of ‘group-based’ abuse. This, Hydrant says, ‘is defined as two or more individuals…who are known to one another and are known to be involved in or to facilitate the sexual exploitation of children and young people.’ Lowe, of course, is speaking specifically about grooming gangs – and in such cases many offenders do have a Pakistani background. Perhaps next time Maitlis accuses someone she doesn’t like of being racist, she should do some more careful research…
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