Suella Braverman falsely claimed child grooming gangs in the UK were “almost all British-Pakistani”, according to a ruling by the press regulator, Ipso.
The home secretary made the claim in a Mail on Sunday article published in April, where she singled out British-Pakistani men as being involved in child sexual abuse gangs due to “cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values” that “have been left mostly unchallenged both within their communities and by wider society”.
The regulator said Braverman’s decision to link “the identified ethnic group and a particular form of offending was significantly misleading” because the Home Office’s own research had concluded offenders were mainly from white backgrounds.
Four days after publishing the article, the Mail on Sunday offered to amend the online version to make clear that the claim related specifically to high-profile grooming gangs, and publish a correction in the print edition, but its wording was rejected by the complainant, who took the case to Ipso.
In its defence, the Mail on Sunday argued that prior to publication it had double-checked Braverman’s decision to single out British-Pakistanis with advisers to the home secretary and the prime minister, Rishi Sunak. Both teams at the top level of government confirmed they had “no concern over this particular line” and were happy for it to be published.
The newspaper also argued it was entitled to rely on factual information provided by the home secretary about the ethnicities of grooming gangs because the Home Office was the department responsible for dealing with the issue – and Braverman was the most senior member of that department.
Though the regulator did not uphold the complaint, finding the newspaper rechecked the claim in advance with the Home Office and offered a prompt remedy afterwards, it concluded that, regardless of the discussions that had gone on behind the scenes, the Mail on Sunday had published an inaccurate statement as fact. This has led to the highly unusual situation of a newspaper printing a factual correction to a comment article authored by a leading cabinet minister.
Although there have been several high-profile examples of British-Pakistanis involved in grooming gangs, research published by the Home Office in 2020 showed that offenders are “most commonly white” and come from diverse backgrounds.
The Mail on Sunday argued it was unfair to rely on this report because the research was published when a different home secretary, Priti Patel, was in charge of the department. It also said the 2020 report concluded it was “difficult to draw conclusions about the ethnicity of offenders as existing research is limited and data collection is poor”.
Braverman’s advisers later said they singled-out British-Pakistanis in the article because of high-profile grooming gang cases in Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford, where there was clear evidence of the ethnicity of the perpetrators, rather than looking at offenders as a whole.
The complaint against the Mail on Sunday was brought by the Centre for Media Monitoring, an offshoot of the Muslim Council of Britain, which has repeatedly used the regulatory system to force corrections from British newspapers.
• This article was amended on 29 September 2023. An earlier version said that Ipso “forced the Mail on Sunday to issue an apology and correction”. In fact, Ipso did not require the newspaper to issue an apology and neither was one given; rather it said the newspaper should publish the correction it had initially offered four days after publication, but which the complainant had rejected. Text was also added to clarify that Ipso did not find that the newspaper breached the Editors’ Code of Practice.
