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”.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I think I read in one of the towns that the police has information on 1000 men being involved, and there where only 3000 muslim men in the town. Prosecutions certainly doesn’t equate to numbers guilty.
I don’t much see the point in quibbling over this figure because how could it be accurate in the first place? We know that many of the rapists were never even arrested and charged, let alone went to trial and sent down, and I’ll hazard a guess that the majority are still out there, free men. This figure, or any other figures for the many more areas where rape gangs operate(d), does not reflect reality, so it’s all kind of by the by, in my opinion. One figure I do remember reading though was that literally zero rapists were deported. A few ran away back to Pakistan before they could be arrested, but none that have served time have subsequently been sent packing. So many of those victims have been denied justice and let down by the very authorities entrusted to safeguard and support them.
Some good people did speak out for these girls though, all of them being persecuted by their colleagues as a result. If you’ve a Twitter account here’s just one thread on this lady. I think, like any normal human being, she managed to recognise that a 13yr old is a ”child” and the crimes being committed constituted ”rape”, unlike certain individuals. An excerpt;
”Meet Sara Rowbotham.
In 2003, she served as coordinator for the Rochdale Crisis Intervention Team.
Soon she uncovered a devastating truth: young poor white girls were being r*ped en masse.
But authorities dismissed her pleas when she reported it.
Here’s her story.
As coordinator for Crisis Invention Team—part of Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust—it was her job to reach out to suspected victims of child sex abuse and r*pe.
In an interview in May 2017, Sara explained: “Because of our nonjudgmental approach, we were able to win their trust in a way that police and social services could not. The girls knew we weren’t there to try to get evidence from them—we were there to help and support them.”
After a few years, she realised the scale of the problem. Huddles of child victims would routinely congregate outside of her offices at 8.30am. The girls were aged 13 to 14, their hair matted, their clothes dirty, the fear palpable from their sunken eyes.
“They had been taken to Saddleworth Moor the night before, violently r*ped by a gang of men and thrown out of the car. They had walked miles through the night from the South Pennines back to Rochdale to wait for our centre to open.”
https://x.com/StarkNakedBrief/status/1879626970964828249
WTF is wrong with these people (not Sara obviously), those in charge? How can anyone even contemplate protecting or covering for these animals?
This is an absolute outrage, from a nation that is supposedly civilised and advanced.
We should not let this drop until everyone even remotely involved is brought to justice.
Agreed. The bit about Sara being ”made redundant” by the NHS doesn’t surprise me as I’ve read accounts of how some girls who were willing to give evidence against their abusers presented to hospital with obvious trauma, psychological and/or physical, and instead of giving them the care they needed these girls got sectioned under the Mental Health Act, so they were consequently deemed unfit to stand trial and classed as ”unreliable witnesses”. So they’re attempting to escape their abusers, turning to those in a position to help them as per their duty of care, only to be this time around held captive against their will and plied with drugs to subdue them, but by NHS personnel in a psychiatric facility instead of Pakistani rapists this time. The obvious end result being that the culprits walked free. It just sounds to me that everybody, with only few exceptions, that should’ve been on the side of the girls were in fact on the side of the criminals. They were let down left, right and centre. But much like the crimes against humanity that was the Scamdemic years, no heads will roll and nobody will be held to account. The rot is just too extensive.
I take the point that dividing the number of men convicted over a number of years into the numbers present in a location today (or in 2020) gives a false rate, however I’m not sure I follow this logic “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.”. Surely that will only be true if Muslims (or men with “Muslim names”) continue to commit crimes. Otherwise the number would drop over time as population increases.
You are being far too kind, beejammer. It’s crazy logic. You should trust your own intelligence more.
I’m sorry Noah, but I am calling rubbish on your application of statistics. You seem to be saying that over a period of twenty years, if one person per year per hundred people is prosecuted, that remains static at one percent, but it is not, because over the twenty years, twenty people are prosecuted per hundred, which is twenty percent. The population doesn’t churn in the period, with a different hundred each year, it remains statistically static, so it remains one in five.
You are correct. He seems to be saying that if a person did a rape in a previous year, it no longer counts. The cumulative amount of offending matters in this case.
You are correct. The logic seems to be that if a rapist was convicted in a prior year it no longer counts.
I’d like to see Noah Carl try to tell women who have been raped that after a year they haven’t been raped.
It would be rather odd if anyone were to claim “I’m not a rapist. I only did it one year”.
Thanks to Noah Carl for his nauseating attempt to downplay the fact that THOUSANDS OF BRITISH CHILDREN HAVE BEEN RAPED BY MUSLIMS.
NONE of those children would have been raped if
NO MUSLIMS HAD EVER BEEN ALLOWED TO SET FOOT IN THE UK.
GANG RAPE WAS ALMOST UNKNOWN everywhere in the West,
until the mass importation of MUSLIMS, particularly from PAKISTAN.
The root of the problem appears to be Barelvi revivalism in Mirpur, from whence many British Pakistani immigrant communities derive.
‘Ahmed Raza Khan, the prominent figure of Barelvi sect, thinks that women are unworthy of consideration.’
https://radianceweekly.net/feminism-and-islam-modern-perspective/
The Barelvi view of women appears to be more derogatory than elsewhere within Islam.
That would make it surprising if Pakistani immigrants derived from Mirpur were not overrepresented amongst immigrant offenders against women in Britain.
Rubbish! Child rape is part of Islamic culture worldwide, like “The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan” and most of the Muslims in Britain have swarmed here from everywhere in Pakistan.
David Atherton on X: “In Afghanistan young boys are sold by their families to more affluent men. In a practice called “bacha bazi” meaning “boy play”, they dance for the men & afterwards they are raped. https://t.co/dmSv3XDJeS” / X
‘Hirsi Ali understands that she’s generalizing, she writes; she’s not saying all Muslim men are rapists. But she is saying that young men from conservative Muslim societies arrive in Europe — and most of the new arrivals are young men — having been previously steeped in profoundly misogynistic cultures and subject to laws that offer women fewer rights than men. That impacts how they behave, she claims, something Western liberals, who worship at the altar of cultural relativism, don’t want to recognize. “When it comes to migrants and minorities,” she writes, ‘pointing to cultural explanations for their behavior toward women is taboo.’
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a CHARLATAN.
This is idiotic. if there is a population of 100 that stays stable over 20 years and, in year 1, 10 of them are convicted of rape, it is legitimate to say that 10% of the population are rapists. By Carl’s, logic it will only be 0.5% because the rapists decently managed to keep out of trouble in years 2 to 20. You don’t stop being a rapist once you’ve been a rapist.
In fact, you would need to do it over, say, 40 years to get a truer percentage – 20 years understates it.
You too can find out how many registered ( so tip of the iceberg, then ) sex offenders you’ve got living in your neck of the woods if you live in Yorkshire. And these figures are only up until the end of March last year. I don’t know why they can’t provide more up to date numbers. And I wonder if these include all the pervert, paedo ( cue downticks from ‘you know who’ ) men who are routinely being reported on for walking free with a suspended sentence for possessing child sex abuse images, or is it only those who’ve ever laid hands on somebody? The trouble is though, I’d want to know if one was living down the street from me or next to a school, but you’d obviously never get that kind of detail;
”Yorkshire has among the highest proportion of sex offenders in the country.
Latest Ministry of Justice (MOJ) figures have revealed there are more sex offenders living in England and Wales than ever before. The number of registered sex offenders has almost doubled in 13 years.
West Yorkshire has a total of 3,451 registered sex offenders, or one for every 606 people aged 10 or over. South Yorkshire has 1,818, or one for every 680 people.
North Yorkshire has 937, or one for every 800 people, while Humberside has 1,449, or one for every 581 people aged 10 or over.
There were 70.052 registered sex offenders living across the various police force areas in the country at the end of March 2024. This is the equivalent to one for every 763 people aged 10 and over.
You can find out the proportion of sex offenders in your area in the interactive widget below.”
https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/local-news/sex-offenders-living-yorkshire-numbers-30789558?utm_source=app
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…
…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.
How can The Daily Sceptic justify publishing such nonsense?
According to the latest census, 1 in 3 people in Scotland have a degree. But according to Noah Carl’s logic, because these educated people did not get a degree all in the same year, but rather over a period of many years, such as over a period of approximately 80 years, therefore only 1 in 240 people in Scotland have a degree!
Whilst accurate statistics are important, this “1 in 73” figure seems particularly useless without further qualification.
Fortunately the entire “r*ape gang” story seems to have disappeared from the front pages of the legacy media, to be replaced by important stuff like a £65 fine for inappropriately parking an e-bike, or the Hollyoaks (2013’s “most violent soap”) actor who has died young apparently due to excessive vaping and drugs use.
Nothing to see here … move on … while the UK’s international reputation gets utterly trashed, and the exploitation of poor, often fatherless, white girls across the country continues.
It takes a whole village to make a child. Whether it’s 1 in 73, 1 in 2 200 – they were “made” by the whole village.
The problem is not just with the children “made” – and there are thousands of then – it’s with the whole village that is making them from generation to generation, so it’s not an anomaly, it’s a feature.
Troubling news from Raja Miah, from 0ldham:
https://youtu.be/6egrJ5Vi0o4
Thank you. This is worth watching for anyone who wants to understand why Starmer is trying to shut down a public enquiry (or ‘delegate’ it to the corrupt councils who themselves are at the heart of the problem).
So the correct figure for Rotherham would be 1/(73×20) ie 1/1460?
I don’t understand statistics but I wonder if Noah Carl does either.
It would be good to see the authors of the 2020 paper respond to Carl’s charge, or to see the views of people who definitely do understand statistics eg Norman Fenton.
What exactly is it in Islam or the Koran that permits or suggests that this kind of behavior towards non Islamic people is acceptable and actually cherished? Do Imams preach this is acceptable? It must be coming from somewhere. Deterence with severe punishment is the only way to stop this. Tolerance, as has been shown everywhere, by authorities will result in an explosion of any crime. Authorities knew that not actively and strongly policing and charging these criminals would encourage more child rapes. It is still going on because it has become politicized by our elected governments. What has happened to the once world renowned British Justice System? Government and other authority response to this is sickening.
Noah is right…but this article is misleading as well.
Let’s go with his figure of 1 in 44,000. That is their rate of prosecution for each year that they live in the UK.
For example, if the average migrant comes to the UK aged 25, and is capable of committing such offences up to age 75, that is 50 years – which means their average likelihood of being prosecuted in their lifetime would be 1 in 880. That in turn would mean that if such a migrant comes to Britain, there is a 1 in 880 chance that they will end up being prosecuted for these offences at some point. Put it another way: if you allow 880 into the country, you are importing one person who will be prosecuted for such offences.
Of course I am ignoring double counting, in that some may be prosecuted more than once for these offences, but you get the idea.
It would be interesting to see the comparable figure for native Britons. I bet it would be very much lower.