Lunch Hour Lecture | What lies behind the “Muslim grooming gangs” crisis?

Date of Lecture: Tuesday 6 December 2022 About the Lecture: For over a decade, the UK has seen an intense focus on “Muslim grooming gangs”. On the one hand, perpetrators have caused very real and significant harms that demand a solid response. On the other, the threat of child sexual exploitation has been actively racialised in ways that are deliberate, misleading and very damaging. In this talk, Dr Ella Cockbain examines the history and impacts of the dominant narrative around “grooming gangs”, exposing the dodgy data, hidden agendas and convenient omissions involved. She considers who has benefitted and who has been harmed by the ways this crisis has been constructed, rendering some issues hyper-visible while obscuring wider problems in child protection. Confronting the realities of child sexual exploitation/abuse, she argues, requires an urgent refocusing of attention, increased resources, and concerted pushback against misinformation, racist stereotypes and self-serving interests in this space.   About the speaker: Dr Ella Cockbain is an Associate Professor in Security and Crime Science at UCL, and a visiting research fellow at Leiden University.