New Germany sex-crime figures reignite migration fight as exploitation probe expands

A supporter wearing a plastic policeman’s helmet and holding fake money criticizes the way the police dealt with the grooming gang scandal on Jan.29, 2022, in Telford, England.(Martin Pope/Getty Images)

“Socioeconomic factors matter, but they absolutely do not fully explain the disparities,” Schubart said.“Native Germans from similar socioeconomic backgrounds absolutely do not show equivalent rates in group sexual offending.”

Schubart said she viewed the apparent intersection between drugs and sexual exploitation as an especially important parallel with Britain.

“In the U.K.and in Germany, it’s a very similar pattern where it’s basically drug trafficking that also involves sex trafficking,” she said.“These drug-trafficking networks and cells operate across the country, not just in those cities where we see the crimes playing out.”

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Britain has spent years reckoning withgrooming scandals in placessuch as Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and Oxford, England, where official reviews found that police, social workers and local authorities repeatedly missed or ignored evidence thatvulnerable children were beingsystematically abused.

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Baroness Louise Casey’s national audit, published by the British government in June 2025, concluded that inconsistent definitions, incomplete records and failures to collect ethnicity data made it impossible to establish the full national scale of group-basedchild sexual exploitation.It nevertheless found evidence of the disproportionate representation of Pakistani-heritage suspects in some local datasets and cases, while warning against extrapolating those findings to the entire country.

The British government later backed an independent inquiry intended to examine failures or obstruction by police, councils and other public bodies in relevant local areas.

Schubart argued that officials in both countries have sometimes avoided discussing offenders’ backgrounds out of concern that doing so could damage relations with minority communities.

“In the U.K., it’s usually the phrase ‘community relations,’” she said.“There’s a huge effort to not threaten community relations.”

Germany’s ifo Institute reportedin February 2025 that its analysis of district-level police data from 2018 through 2023 found no correlation between a rising foreign population and local crime rates, including in areas receiving more refugees. 

“We find no correlation between an increasing share of foreigners in a district and the local crime rate,” ifo researcher Jean-Victor Alipour said when the findings were released.“The same applies in particular to refugees.” Researchers said differences in suspect rates can be influenced by age, sex, urban concentration andother demographic factors.

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A woman poses with a sign as members of the public queue to enter a council meeting during a protest calling for justice for victims of sexual abuse and grooming gangs, outside the council offices at City Centre on Jan.20, 2025, in Oldham, England.(Anthony Devlin/Getty Images)

Germany’s Syrian population also plays a significant role in sectors facing severe labor shortages. 

The German Medical Association reported that 7,959 Syrian citizens were working as physicians in Germany at the end of 2025, making Syrians the country’s largest group of foreign doctors.

The competing evidence presents European governments with a difficult test: investigating organized exploitation and demographic patterns without political hesitation, while avoiding the suggestion that hundreds of suspects define millions of immigrants.

Follow her on X @efratlachter.Stories can be sent toefrat.com.