Reporting on child abuse Part 2

Some lads from Oxford have been sent to jail for child sexual abuse. The details of their treatment of vulnerable young girls does not bear repeating. The BBC, the main conduit of news for the respectable classes, makes no mention about a key issue: the background of the abused girls. The pictures of these loathsome characters reveals some features in common, but nothing about the features of the girls, who of course cannot be pictured in this appalling story. They seem to have been, by a significant majority, white girls from poor and disturbed backgrounds, possibly of low intelligence. Mark Easton, in a somewhat more pensive article BBC article attached to the main story,  reflecting on some of the conclusions of a Child Commisioner's Report says "Black and particularly Asian perpetrators remain over-represented".

I have previously blogged about this study, which I found was somewhat evasive about the data they collected, so to save you searching for it I will copy out the relevant paragraph.

the Commission’s own figures show that only half the predicted number of White perpetrators were actually found (43% versus 88%), twice the number of “mixed” ethnicity (3.8% versus 1.8%), almost 5 times the number of Asians (33% versus 6.7%) and almost 7 times the numbers of Blacks (19% versus 2.8%).

Responsible reporting should be accurate, not evasive.