Data on the ethnicity of perpetrators are considerably less reliable than that supplied on age or gender.During site visits and in interviews with children and young people there were occasions when references to the ethnicity of perpetrators changed during the course of the discussion. Ethnicity and nationality were sometimes confused. Unless a perpetrator had actually been arrested, it was difficult to be sure whether or not their ethnicity had been correctly identified. In addition, professionals adopted a range of methods for capturing data on ethnicity, and often used broad headings such as ‘Asian’ or ‘White’ to capture individuals.
As stated earlier, children were not always able to provide accurate accounts of the ethnicity of all of their abusers. Given that only 3% of call for evidence submissions could provide full perpetrator data, and that 68% of submissions did not provide any perpetrator data, the chart below must be viewed with caution as the picture is incomplete. Based on the call for evidence submissions, the ethnicity of identified perpetrators was reported as follows
Of the 26% of submissions provided information on a total of 1514 perpetrators, although for 21% of these cases the ethnicity of the perpetrator was not provided. Where the ethnicity of perpetrators was provided, 545 were recorded as ‘White’, 415 were recorded as ‘Asian’, and 244 were recorded as ‘Black’. B
