Suella Braverman's claim regarding the ethnicity of grooming gangs has been deemed false by the press regulator, Ipso.
In an article published by the Mail on Sunday in April, the Home Secretary alelged that child grooming gangs in the UK were almost all British-Pakistani.
He singled out British-Pakistani men for their involvement in child sexual abuse, citing cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values that had allegedly gone unchallenged in their communities and by society at large.
Ipso has compelled the Mail on Sunday to issue an apology and a correction for Braverman's article, as it concluded that her statement was untrue.
The regulator found that Braverman's decision to link a specific ethnic group to a particular form of offending was significantly misleading.
This was especially in light of research conducted by the Home Office itself, which indicated that offenders were primarily from white backgrounds.
In its defense, the Mail on Sunday argued that it had sought confirmation from advisors to the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, prior to publication.
Both top-level government teams had confirmed that they had no reservations about the statement and approved its publication.
The newspaper also argued, though unsuccessfully, that it was entitled to rely on factual information provided by the Home Secretary about the ethnicities of grooming gangs.
The Home Office was responsible for dealing with the issue, and Braverman was the most senior member of that department.
However, the regulator concluded that despite the discussions that had occurred behind the scenes, the Mail on Sunday had published an inaccurate statement as fact.
This has resulted in the unusual situation of a newspaper having to print a factual correction to a comment article authored by a leading cabinet minister.
While there have been high-profile cases involving British-Pakistani individuals in grooming gangs, research released by the Home Office in 2020 indicated that offenders were "most commonly white" and came from diverse backgrounds.
The Mail on Sunday argued that it was unfair to rely on this report because it was published during the tenure of a different Home Secretary, Priti Patel.
They also contended that the 2020 report had concluded that it was "difficult to draw conclusions about the ethnicity of offenders as existing research is limited and data collection is poor."
Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford
Bravermans advisors later explained that they had singled out British-Pakistanis in the article because of prominent grooming gang cases in Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford.
Where there was clear evidence of the ethnicity of the perpetrators, rather than considering offenders as a whole.
The complaint against the Mail on Sunday was filed by the Centre for Media Monitoring, an affiliate of the Muslim Council of Britain, which has used the regulatory system on multiple occasions to secure corrections from British newspapers.
