The ethnicity and nationality of all suspects in child sexual abuse and exploitation cases in Britain will be recorded by the police under new mandatory reporting rules, the British home secretary told Parliament on Monday. The requirement was one of the recommendations of a government-commissioned review into a decades-long scandal in Britain involving so-called grooming gangs. The term refers to the sexual exploitation of young girls by groups of men in several towns and cities, which first came to widespread public attention in the early 2010s. Most of the perpetrators in the largest criminal prosecutions so far have been of Pakistani heritage. She added that while “a lot of attention” had been given to the issue of grooming gangs and “reviews, inquiries and reports have made recommendations,” they had not been acted on forcefully enough, and victims had been repeatedly failed.

Source: The Times June 17, 2025 05:32 UTC