Ceop said it had evidence of 230 gangs, mostly young men, who were identifying and grooming children for systematic sexual abuse. Some groups were large enough to be considered organised crime enterprises that were supplying victims to be raped by paying clients.
"This is a horrific kind of crime," said Mr Davies. "It involves systematic, premeditated rape of children and needs to be understood in those stark terms. It needs to be brought out of the dark." read more
Ceop press release
Warning: suspicious data-manipulations concerning ethnicity - leaving out 2/3s of cases (first half the cases then 32 percent of the remaining), and not stating any definitions of the different categories etc.
The report itself declares numbers regarding ethnicity irrelevant.
‘Ethnicity’ was often conflated with ‘nationality’. Neither factor is captured according to a standardised or conventional classification scheme. For example, in many circumstances, a single entry for both ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationality’ may have been recorded as ‘British Asian’ by a police force or other agency. Clearly, this entry is inadequate for the classification of ethnicity according to conventional schemes.
We do not draw national conclusions about ethnicity from the data available at this time because it is too inconsistent.It is also significantly reliant on a relatively limited number of areas where agencies have been proactive and where there have been substantial police investigations. Further research would be needed to examine whether the ethnic breakdown reflects issues that need to be addressed within a community context, local demographics of the areas from which data is drawn, an unconscious bias among agency responses or other factors that need to be explored. (p.41)
But for assessing the magnitude of the problem the report is among the first of its kind
Street Grooming Study - 2,000 victims of systematic abuse
