How we grade evidence

ESTABLISHED Established

Found by a statutory inquiry, court, official inspection or government publication — including that source's own stated uncertainty. An 'established' estimate is still an estimate: the tier tells you a primary source published it, not that the number is exact.

Example: The Jay Report's conservative estimate of children affected in Rotherham.

UNVERIFIED Unverified

Circulating in public debate but not traceable to a primary source, or produced by a methodology that cannot be checked. Unverified does not mean false — it means no one can currently show you the working.

Example: National victim-total extrapolations that no official dataset supports.

CONTESTED Contested

Credible sources disagree, or the underlying data is known to be too incomplete to settle the question. We show what each side rests on and what would resolve it.

Example: Claims about offender ethnicity proportions, where most police records are missing the data.

TESTIMONY Testimony

First-person accounts of survivors, whistleblowers and practitioners, given to inquiries or on the public record. Testimony is evidence — inquiries convict institutions on it — but a single account is not a statistic.

Example: Survivor evidence given to the Telford inquiry and to IICSA's Truth Project.

250,000 victims UNVERIFIED Casey Audit, 2025

A national victim total produced by extrapolating local estimates across the country. Its provenance is now traceable: the non-statutory Rape Gang Inquiry report (2026) says the figure "originates directly from" a 2019 House of Lords question extrapolating from Rotherham, Telford and Oxford — and itself concedes it "is not a precise count. No such count exists". No official dataset supports a precise national figure: the Casey Audit found prevalence data inadequate to produce one. That cuts both ways — the true number is unknown, and could not currently be shown to be lower either.

87% / 95% offender-ethnicity claims CONTESTED Casey Audit, 2025

Percentages claiming to settle the ethnicity of group-based offenders circulate in both directions — some asserting offenders are overwhelmingly of one background, others that they mirror the general population. The Home Office's own review (2020) concluded existing studies could not support reliable national conclusions, and the Casey Audit (2025) found ethnicity data missing from most police case records. Until the mandatory data collection it recommended produces results, every such percentage is built on incomplete records — whichever conclusion it points to.

149 towns and districts affected UNVERIFIED Rape Gang Inquiry report, 2026

This count comes from the district appendix of the non-statutory Rape Gang Inquiry report (2026). The list mixes places with concluded convictions and places where the stated basis is witness contact with that inquiry, without a published per-district evidence threshold — so the list as a whole cannot be independently checked. There is no official register of affected towns; the statutory inquiry's local investigations programme is the closest thing being built. See the map for the documented record plotted separately from this claim.