Child sexual exploitation and young British Muslim men: a modern moral panic?

This chapter invites the reader to examine recent well-publicised incidents of Asian/Muslim men being convicted of sexual offences committed against children across various locations in the UK including Rochdale, Oxford, Derby and Rotherham. For a prudent academic evaluation, the chapter directs the reader to consider these incidents against broader historic and politicised social constructions of deviant populations, Islamophobia and the role of the media in distorting public perceptions of the extent and motivations of the offending behaviour. The first part of the chapter will explore the pitfalls of categorisation of minority populations and crime leading to a discussion about the processes of racialisation which maintain historic racial hierarchies. The discussion will then address the constituent ingredients of a criminological moral panic before examining whether the same concept applies to the cases of Asian grooming and child sexual exploitation (CSE).