The issue of grooming gangs has been a major subject of debate in recent weeks. One figure that has been repeatedly cited is that 1 in 73 Muslim men in the town of Rotherham has been prosecuted for grooming gang offences. While technically true, this figure is slightly misleading.
Its source is a 2020 paper by Kish Bhatti-Sinclair and Charles Sutcliffe. These researchers collected data on prosecutions of grooming gangs between 1997 and 2017 by reviewing over 2,000 media reports. They identified 498 accused perpetrators, of whom 83% had Muslim names. The researchers then calculated, for each local authority where there had been at least one prosecution during the relevant time period, the number of Muslim men per Muslim prosecuted for grooming gang offences. For Rotherham, the number was 73.
Why is this figure misleading? There are two reasons.
The first is that it is the second highest fraction out of all the figures in Bhatti-Sinclair and Sutcliffe’s table. For example, in Slough (which had the second lowest fraction) the number of Muslim men per Muslim prosecuted for grooming gang offences was 10,874. Is this because there is something fundamentally different about Slough? Perhaps. More likely is that the rate of prosecutions for grooming gang offence is a noisy measure of the true, underlying rate of grooming gang offences.
Overall, Bhatti-Sinclair and Sutcliffe estimated that 1 in 2,200 Muslim men in England was prosecuted for grooming gang offences. This figure is arguably more informative than the one for Rotherham, since it averages out a lot of the noise. The true underlying rate could, of course, be higher than 1 in 2,200 if many cases are not recorded. And it could vary between smaller towns like Slough and Rotherham, and larger cities like Birmingham and London.
The second reason why the figure for Rotherham, and indeed all the figures in Bhatti-Sinclair and Sutcliffe’s table, are misleading is that they were computed by dividing the number of Muslim men in a single year by the number of Muslim men prosecuted over 20 years. This is not normally how crime rates are computed, and for good reason: it’s not comparing apples with apples.
Crime rates (or prosecution rates) are useful because they tell us how many crimes were committed relative to the total number of potential opportunities for crime. For crimes committed over multiple years, the total number of potential opportunities is much larger than the number of people who were alive in a single year. Assuming for the sake of simplicity that the population is stable, the total number of potential opportunities is equal to the number of people multiplied by the number of years (i.e., the number of person-years).
To see why this is right, note that if we used an arbitrarily long time-interval for the number of crimes, we could eventually conclude that every single person in the relevant category had been prosecuted! But this would be meaningless.
We therefore need to multiply the denominator of Bhatti-Sinclair and Sutcliffe’s figures by 20. In other words, the least misleading way to present the numbers from their table would be to say that: in the period 1997–2017, Muslim men in England and Wales were prosecuted for grooming gang offences at an average rate of 1 in 44,000.
Once again, this could well be an underestimate of the true underlying rate if many cases are not recorded. But the statement itself is accurate, since it refers to prosecutions not actual cases. It’s also worth noting that Bhatti-Sinclair and Sutcliffe found evidence that Pakistanis specifically, rather than Muslims in general, were dramatically overrepresented among grooming gang offenders.
An earlier version of this article referred to “potential criminals” rather than “potential opportunities for crime”.
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