Gendering ‘Girls’ and Racialising ‘Boys’ in Group Prosecutions of Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE)

In the policing and prosecution of Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE), who is treated as ‘a child’ before the law (and who, therefore, can automatically occupy the category of ‘victim’) relates to gender, class, ‘race’, and sexual behaviour as much as age. In the Rotherham (UK) CSE scandal, for example, police and local authorities failed to recognise victims of abuse as children (and thus as vulnerable and victims) due to classed and gendered judgements about their behaviour (Casey 2015). Inversely, across multiple Western jurisdictions, scholars have found racialized children are subject to ‘adultification’ by legal decision-makers (Davis and Marsh 2020; Hamilton-Jiang 2023).

This paper is based on a two-year ethnography in a city in England accompanying racialised defendants and their family members through the court process alongside analysis of closing speech transcripts – as a stylized form of talk-in-interaction in which power and social relations operate explicitly and in coded ways (Rosulek 2014) – in four multi-handed prosecutions for group-based Child Sexual Exploitation (involving a total of 27 defendants and 16 complainants). The paper examines the gendered and racialised construction of complainants and defendants by prosecution and defence barristers through analysis of person reference, and how complainants and defendants respond to or resist infantalisation / adultification. Reflecting on notions of ‘ideal’ victims/perpetrators and their relationship to class, gender and ‘race’, along with the ways hegemonic narratives about sexual assault underpin judicial hearings, the paper asks what role court talk plays in providing a scaffolding for (in)justice.