Key findings:
- Research on offender ethnicity is limited, and tends to rely on poor quality data. It is therefore difficult to draw conclusions about differences in ethnicity of offenders, but it is likely that no one community or culture is uniquely predisposed to offending.
In your excitement and haste, to post this irrelevant snippet, you neglected to read the whole passage. Let me get that for you....
Key findings:
• Research on offender ethnicity is limited, and tends to rely on poor quality data. It is therefore difficult to draw conclusions about differences in ethnicity of offenders, but it is likely that no one community or culture is uniquely predisposed to offending.
• A number of studies have indicated an over-representation of Asian and Black offenders in group-based CSE.
Most of the same studies show that the majority of offenders are White.
• Community and cultural factors are, however, relevant to understanding and tackling offending. An approach to deterring, disrupting, and preventing offending that is sensitive to the communities in which offending occurs is needed. 75. There is a limited amount of research looking at the ethnicity of perpetrators of group-based CSE, which makes it difficult to draw conclusions about whether or not certain ethnicities are over-represented in this type of offending. What research there is tends to rely on poor-quality data, with issues in a number of areas:
• Data in this space is reliant on ‘known’ or identified offending behaviour, therefore limiting our understanding of group-based CSE in its entirety.
• Law enforcement data can be particularly vulnerable to bias, in terms of those cases that come to the attention of the authorities, and this can impact on the generalisability of such data.46 This can also lead to greater attention being paid to certain types of offenders, making that data more readily identified and recorded.47
• Police-collected data on ethnicity uses broad categories and requires the police to assign an ethnicity rather than it being self-reported by offenders. Data is therefore not always accurate; Berelowitz et al. (2012) observed cases of offenders being initially classed as ‘Asian’ but actually coming from other backgrounds, such as White British or Afghan.