The slow path to reliable data on child sexual abuse

Good morning. States have to be able to count. That’s why shortcomings in the UK’s economic data are such a big problem — do read this interview with Meg Hillier by Sam Fleming and George Parker if you haven’t yet. As I wrote yesterday, it’s part of why the Conservative case for a fresh inquiry into grooming gangs, at this stage, is hard to see as anything other than pure politicking. This morning shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick defended his party’s record but said it could have done more while in government to crack down on grooming gangs.

Among your very kind emails and messages about yesterday’s newsletter, I received a similar question to the one I got about an earlier Inside Politics in which I discussed police shootings: how to handle the publication of small datasets. I never got around to answering that one, but, as my answer to both is the same, I will address that in today’s note.

The challenge of numbers

For the first time, we have something approaching decent data about child sexual abuse and group-based child sexual abuse in England and Wales, as the implementation of the 2022 reporting into child sexual abuse starts to bear some fruit.

I set out some of the relevant reasons why I used that word “approaching” yesterday, but today I wanted to talk about the rest.

Criminal justice statistics in the UK do not — and this is really important — necessarily track the year that a crime actually happens. It’s more accurate to say they reflect the time when the relevant part of the state comes into contact with that crime or that consequence.

Statistics about convicted offenders in 2023, for example tell us about the people convicted in 2023, which isn’t quite the same thing as documenting what actually happened in 2023.

The starkest illustration of that can be found in England and Wales’ homicide statistics from the Home Office (criminal justice is devolved in Scotland and Northern Ireland). See this spike in 2003?

What happened here is not that England and Wales had one particularly homicidal year in 2003, but that 173 known victims of the serial killer Harold Shipman all counted for that year, because that is when the full extent of Shipman’s crimes came to light, following an investigation and his conviction.

However, this doesn’t really matter when it comes to homicide statistics: there are so few murders in a normal year in the UK — between 500 to 700 — that these statistics are pretty noisy, and what they tell us we could mostly just guess from other crime statistics. (That’s not to say they aren’t useful.)

But as the British state seeks to have adequate data on child sexual abuse, a distinct challenge is that it will be some time indeed before we have a good grip on a “normal” year. In addition, children who are abused often only tell the authorities about it years after the fact. That’s a big part of why, when the first set of data was published under Rishi Sunak’s government, there was a less detailed breakdown of the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims than the most recent set published under Keir Starmer: because the then-Conservative government’s view was that these figures were so small as to be meaningless.

For some time, that means that these statistics will be measuring three things: improvements in the quality of data collection by police forces in England and Wales, and how effectively the state is encouraging survivors to come forward about what has happened to them, and what the precise nature of child sexual abuse in the UK is. Although these statistics will become more and more meaningful, we will be living with that long-running failure to collect proper data for some time.

When I wrote about police shootings in England and Wales and the limitations of what they told us, several of you asked, not unreasonably, why we published ethnicity data about such small numbers.

My view is that if you don’t publish what you know, people are going to baselessly speculate anyway. In the most part, it is not that people come away with wrong-headed ideas about police shootings in England or child sexual abuse because they look at a small dataset and draw the wrong conclusions. They do so because they have a conclusion they wish to reach and the data, or the lack of it, is distorted or ignored to fit it.

Over the longer term, those small numbers tell you a little bit. As I wrote yesterday, we should treat claims about what the data tells us about child sexual abuse in the UK with caution because primarily what these records suggest is that we haven’t had good data until relatively recently. Data for England and Wales on the ethnicity of both victims and suspects of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse cases recorded in 2023 was published under the Labour government in November (you can read the full report here):

The decision to not publish more detailed data under the last Conservative government did not stop the Conservative opposition making false claims about the publication and the content of that data. And the publication of detailed data about deaths in police custody did not stop some charities making inaccurate claims about who dies in custody in the UK.

Ultimately, some people are going to be dishonest about what the data shows. You can’t prevent that by not publishing it or by opting not to collect it. All that would do is put the state in a worse position to make policy decisions by depriving governments of decent data, and make scrutiny of government policy worse by impairing our ability to look at it.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to the score to the terrific musical adaptation of Cyrano while writing my column.

Top stories today

• ‘We’ve had enough of inquiries’ | Prof Alexis Jay, the former chair of a seven-year national inquiry into child sexual abuse in England and Wales that reported in 2022, has criticised people for having “waded into the argument” over the issue “in a very uninformed way”. She previously condemned the former Conservative government for failing to implement 20 of the recommendations in her report. “We’ve had enough of inquiries, consultations and discussions, especially for those victims and survivors . . . they clearly want action,” she told the BBC.

• ‘Line has been crossed’ | Keir Starmer has hit back at Elon Musk over his comments on Britain’s handling of historic sex abuse cases, as French President Emmanuel Macron also expressed alarm at the billionaire’s interventions in European politics.

• Reform minded | The government has launched a new partnership between the NHS and private sector in England aimed at reducing waiting lists, but admitted the move was controversial.

• Check please | UK City minister Tulip Siddiq has referred herself to the government’s adviser on ministerial standards over her property holdings, Keir Starmer said yesterday.

• ‘Squeaky bum time for Kemi’ | The media-averse Kemi Badenoch has yet to land significant blows on an underperforming Keir Starmer or have an impact against Nigel Farage. George Parker and Lucy Fisher take a look at her strategy, record so far and whether she can unite the right.