A lie keeps circulating that Muslim men in the UK, specifically Pakistani men are hundreds of times more likely to be convicted of sex offences than other men. In fact the reverse is true – Pakistani men are less likely to be convicted of such offences than other men.
British Muslim Men have been accused by the EDL and other islamophobes with being sexual predators in articles such as:
http://investmentwatchblog.com/sexual-emergency-muslims-account-for-91-of-child-rapes-in-uk/
and
http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2016/august/easy-meat-britains-muslim-rape-gang-cover-up
The first article’s claim seems to go back to a Times article that was identifying a pattern of abuse convictions. The article identified a number of convictions of gangs over a period of time. But this was a selected set of convictions picking only those convictions that involved people identifiable as Muslims. So the selection of evidence was in no way representative of the total picture but was only looking for a pattern of Muslims who did this crime. (http://www.thetimes.co.uk/…..)
The Times article draws on numbers which go back to 1997 and identifies some 100 convictions including over 90 Muslim names.
In looking for the real percentage, I found https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/child-abuse-and-neglect/child-sexual-abuse/sexual-abuse-facts-statistics/
This shows that there have been 30,000 convictions for just child sexual abuse since 1997. How many of these can be identified as Muslims I cannot say, but the Times went to great lengths to find the pattern they claimed, so I suspect the list of 100 convictions they picked represent the lion’s share of Muslim convictions. If so, then the real number of convictions for child rape may be as little as 100 in 30000, or 0.3% of convictions. Even if the figure is many times this amount, a Muslim would still be less likely be convicted for child rape than a non-Muslim. The articles above in contrast essentially claims that Muslims are responsible for about 27000 of these convictions and so are about 200 times more likely to be a child abuser than a non-Muslim. Evidently this claim breaks the bovine excrement meter.
Digging further to get the real numbers I found
https://fullfact.org/news/are-asians-disproportionately-represented-prosecutions-sex-offences/
This seems to have the most detail and shows that based on the ethnic makeup of Muslims in the UK, Muslims make no more percentage of convictions for sex offences than their overall percentage of the population:
Based on the number here, the focus of this story being Pakistani men, they represent 2.5% of the UK male population and 4 in every 15 of those classed as Asian. The data in the article from fullfact.org contains the following graphic:
Based on these two numbers we can presume that the conviction rates for Pakistani men for sex offences in 2010, was 4/15 of 8% of the Asians convicted, which is 2.1% of the general population. Since this represents the large majority of Muslims in the UK, the conclusion is:
Muslim Men in the UK are not 200 times as likely, but are actually less likely to be convicted of a sex offence than other men.
This of course is defining Muslim by ethnicity, which is not correct. If we are looking at the percentage of the “Muslim” population that are convicted for such offences who are practicing Islam – particularly with respect to the times news story about grooming gangs – then we have to recognise another pattern: The perpetrators of these crimes are using drugs and alcohol as a key ingredient in their behaviour. Beyond spurious allegations of Islam allowing keeping sex slaves – the Qur’an specifically forbids forcing captive women into prostitution in 24:33 – there is nothing “Muslim” about someone who happens to have a particular ethnic origin and then goes around disobeying the rules of Islam.
The real issue of sexual abuse is the ambiguity around consent, many of the girls involved in the cases involving grooming for sexual abuse refused to make any claim against their abusers because they considered them to be their partners. The real failures in their cases are their parents and guardians, who have failed them miserably. Chief among those are the so-called care homes who are supposed to help the most vulnerable children but are the main supply of victims, failing dismally to teach them about healthy human relationships.
The issue of consent is is crucial and explored further here: Ending the Epidemic of Sexual Abuse