Labour firebrand tweets misleading statistics that fail to specify group-based abuse as Tories accuse her of ‘deliberately obscuring the truth’ about rape gangs
Labour firebrand Diane Abbott has been caught red-handed using discredited data about grooming gangs – just 24 hours after Home Secretary Yvette Cooper warned MPs the very same figures were “completely inadequate.”
The veteran MP sparked fury by tweeting “facts” about child sexual abuse that failed to distinguish between lone offenders and organised grooming gangs, in what critics branded a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters of the national scandal.
Abbott crowed on social media: “There is a lot of nonsense and deliberate misinformation about child sexual grooming. Some media only ‘care’ about certain perpetrators, some politicians talk as if they are the only perpetrators. The facts are very different.”
The Misleading ‘Facts’
The Hackney North MP then referenced data claiming that 88 per cent of convicted child sex offenders are white – but crucially failed to specify these figures did NOT break down group-based child sexual abuse cases.
Her intervention comes at a highly sensitive time, with the Government announcing a national inquiry into grooming gangs following Baroness Casey’s damning report that revealed more than 800 cases requiring investigation.
Tory MP’s Devastating Response
Conservative MP Katie Lam delivered a withering response to Abbott’s claims, pointing out the obvious flaw in her argument.
This is unsurprising; the majority of people in this country are white,” Lam noted, adding that the statistics “include historic offences, which will have been committed when the population was more white than it is now.
The Tory MP’s intervention highlighted how Abbott’s broad-brush statistics deliberately obscured the specific issue of organised grooming gangs that has sparked national outrage.
Home Secretary’s Warning IGNORED
Most damaging for Abbott is that her tweet came just one day after Home Secretary Yvette Cooper explicitly warned Parliament about the unreliability of the exact data Abbott was citing.
Cooper told MPs yesterday: “I warned in January that the data collection we inherited from the previous Government on ethnicity was completely inadequate; the data was collected on only 37 per cent of suspects.
The Home Secretary added that Baroness Casey’s audit had confirmed “ethnicity data is not recorded for two thirds of grooming gang perpetrators.
Casey Report’s Damning Verdict
Most embarrassingly for Abbott, the Casey report specifically stated that the available data is “not good enough to support any statements about the ethnicity of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders at the national level.
This direct contradiction of Abbott’s “facts” claim has left the Labour MP facing accusations of deliberately spreading misinformation at a time when victims are demanding truth and justice.
Pattern of Denial?
Critics say Abbott’s intervention fits a concerning pattern of some on the left attempting to downplay or deflect from the specific issue of grooming gangs.
By conflating all child sexual offences with the specific phenomenon of organised group-based abuse, Abbott’s tweet serves to obscure rather than illuminate the truth about this national scandal.
The Real Issue
What Abbott’s misleading statistics fail to address is the specific nature of grooming gang crimes – organised groups systematically targeting vulnerable girls for sexual exploitation.
The Casey report has identified clear evidence of “over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men” in the limited data that does exist from three police forces.
It also referenced “examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions.
Victims Deserve Better
With more than 800 cases now under investigation and the number expected to exceed 1,000, victims of grooming gangs deserve better than politicians playing statistical games with their suffering.
Abbott’s use of discredited data – explicitly warned against by her own party’s Home Secretary just 24 hours earlier – represents exactly the kind of obfuscation that allowed this scandal to fester for so many years.
As one victim’s advocate put it: “We need truth, not political point-scoring. Using misleading statistics helps no one except those who want to sweep this under the carpet.”
Image credit: Diane Abbott, 2016 Labour Party Conference – © Rwendland, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
