Most of the victims are white and most of the convicted offenders are of Pakistani heritage, unlike other known models of child-sex offending in Britain, including child abuse initiated by online grooming, in which the vast majority of perpetrators are white, according to a report in The Times.
Northern police forces have investigated gangs of on-street predators for at least 14 years. In the most serious cases, children have been moved around the country in cars and used for sex by older men.
This has led to abortions for girls as young as 12. In November, a court heard that when a South Yorkshire victim, aged 13, was examined by a nurse it was found that she have been raped more than 50 times.
Most forces, in common with charities and agencies working to help girls who have endured weeks and sometimes months and years of repeated sexual abuse, have denied publicly that ethnicity has any relevance to this pattern of on-street grooming.
The newspaper has identified 17 court prosecutions since 1997, 14 of them during the past three years, involving the on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16 by groups of men. The victims came from 13 towns and cities and in each case two or more men were convicted of offences.
In total, 56 people, with an average age of 28, were found guilty of crimes including rape, child abduction, indecent assault and sex with a child. Three of the 56 were white, 53 were Asian. Of those, 50 were Muslim and a majority were members of the British Pakistani community.
According to the report, those convicted represent only a small proportion of what one detective described as a "tidal wave" of offending that has been uncovered in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and some Midlands counties.