[claudiawerner]

It's a very sad and horribly managed situation in the name of supposedly good intentions. However, the facts and details have been drummed up over the years by Murdoch-owned media, and the statistics used to "prove" the extent of the abuse, and its attribution to "Asian men" has been criticized as not only unscientific but pseudoscientific. There's a good overview of the history of the case, its media attention, and journalistic standards, by Cockbain and Tufail, two academic criminologists, here[0]. Not only that, but some of the victims themselves have spoken out about being used as playing chips for right-wing rhetoric in Rotherham (as noted in the paper).

>Javid’s response to Champion was scooped by The Times’ aforementioned Andrew Norfolk and reported as the home secretary having ‘ordered research into why men convicted of grooming-gang sex crimes are disproportionately of Pakistani origin’.44 Although this angle misrepresented Javid’s actual letter, it was repeated across numerous news outlets – and neither Javid nor Champion apparently cared to correct it.45 Consequently, the impression stood that ethnic disproportionality in ‘grooming gangs’ was an accepted fact and legitimate focus for government-commissioned research.

And rather importantly:

>Although criminal justice data on ethnicity should always be treated cautiously (and data on religion are simply not collected as standard), Asians were notably not overrepresented among the approximately 172,000 men and 27,000 women convicted of sexual offences in England and Wales in 2016.

[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03063968198957...