The Racialization of the Rape Crisis? Revisiting BBC’s Three Girls Following Baroness Casey’s National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse
Abstract
This article examines the racialization of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) in the United Kingdom through an interdisciplinary analysis of Baroness Casey’s National Audit and the BBC drama Three Girls. Situating both within wider political and cultural discourses, it explores how ethnicity is mobilized in policy, data collection and dissemination, and media representation. The article demonstrates that limited ethnicity data, alongside selective narrative emphasis, risks reinforcing racialized rape myths that construct non-white men as inherent sexual threats of white women and girls. It argues that such framings marginalize non-white victims, distort public understanding of CSEA, and undermine equitable justice responses.
Keywords: sexual offending; group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA); race; ethnicity; perpetration; victimization; interdisciplinary; socio-legal.
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