A national strategy focused on collecting more detailed data about child grooming gangs has been launched by the Home Office.
The Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Strategy aims to identify and convict offenders who operate in groups by gathering more information about the characteristics of gangs, including their ethnicity.
This initiative has been welcomed by the NCA, GCHQ, and charity NSPCC who said it received more than 40 calls a day about child sexual abuse since the pandemic began.
This comes after a paper published by the Home Office found that it is difficult to draw conclusions about the ethnicity of offenders because existing data is too limited.