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Notes -
I did some calculations on this back in August elsewhere, so I might as well finish the job and present a model using demographic data from here.
TL;DR between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 is reasonable for Rotherham. As for the whole country, that gets harder. How do you extrapolate Rotherham to the rest of the country to get an upper bound worst case scenario? Probably via demographics? Rotherham has 60 convictions and therefore 23 victims per perpetrator. It's population is 15.5% Asian, which isn't all Pakistani Muslim, but that group is probably around 10% of the population, so ~7,150 people. So about 1 in 120 of this demographic are perpetrators. The total Pakistani Muslim population of the UK is 1.6m, so if everywhere is as bad as Rotherham, there would be about 13,300 perpetrators and 300,000 victims. So I'd say the claim of "hundreds of thousands" is at least within the bounds of plausibility but a million is right out. This all has the caveat that it's entirely reliant on applying current demographic numbers to crimes that, as so far investigated, were largely carried out in the 90s and 00s. If the gangs are an ongoing problem, or if the Pakistani population in Rotherham was far smaller in the 90s, then the numbers change a lot.
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