People who groom - not who we think they are

We’ve collated the results of several years of research in association with people who’ve been groomed.

We ask asked them about their groomers. Here’s what we found out: our data flies in the face of dangerous suppositions about the ethnicity of groomers and about the prevalence of gangs.

It’s fair to say our data isn’t perfect because people self identified as having been groomed. But neither is police or media data - adults don’t always report to the police because grooming itself isn’t illegal; and lots of people don’t seek out media attention;and the media won’t touch stories with a high chance of being sued or that won’t resonate with their readership.

But we cannot ignore data provided by so many victims.

• 87.9% of groomers used their own identity; 6.7% of victims said their groomer used a false identity, and the balance were unsure. (Sample size 373 self defined grooming victims)

• 83.5% of victims were groomed by a single (one) male; 6.9% were groomed by a single (one) female; 6.7% knew that more than one person was was involved. The remainder reported females with teams, married couples and two reports of transgender groomers.(Sample size 375 self defined grooming victims)

• If the fact that most groomers work alone (83.5%) rather than in “grooming gangs” flies in the face of coverage of grooming, so will the ethnicity of groomers described by their victims. 9.3% of the population is Asian, but Asian groomers only accounted for 7.4% of the groomers our victims described. The black and mixed raced groomers fell in line with population averages, and the only group that was overly represented was ‘others’, but that’s largely due to people responding from outside of the UK.

  Most groomers are white males and are not working in gangs!
  

  Sample size 376 people who self identified as having been groomed as an adult.