Four key takeaways from the
grooming gangs report
The author of the major report into child sexual exploitation has said she is "fairly sure" grooming gangs are still active in the UK.
Baroness Louise Casey, who led a rapid national audit on child sex abuse on behalf of the government, took questions from a committee of MPs on Tuesday, one day after her findings were published.
Rapid means 'quick and dirty'!
She told the Commons Home Affairs Committee that what is known as group-based child sexual exploitation is "thankfully still rare", although her report did note that the scale of the problem nationwide is still unknown.
So, 1400 girls in the small city of Rotherham. As many as 50 other towns and cities involved - how is that 'rare'?
"It may be at the most heinous end of crimes, but we have to get a sense of proportionality of where it fits in the 100,000 crimes of child abuse that have been reported in the last 12 months," she said.
Here she compares apples to oranges to dilute the shock effect!
"I'm fairly sure that it's still happening today... I think people don't necessarily look hard enough to find these children in particular."
I'm quite sure you didn't, Baroness.
The publication of Baroness Casey's report comes after Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer committed to launching a national inquiry into the abuse.
It found that authorities "shied away" from the ethnicity of sex offenders, despite concerns over a disproportionate pattern which saw men of predominately Pakistani origin targeting white girls.
Among the 12 recommendations made in the report, which the government says it will act on "immediately", is a more rigid system of data collection of ethnicity of victims and perpetrators.
However, Casey urged people to “keep calm” about drawing conclusions from data on the ethnicity of suspects and offenders.
"If you look at the data on child sexual exploitation, suspects and offenders, it’s disproportionately Asian heritage. If you look at the data for child abuse, it is not disproportionate, and it is white men," she said.
We're talking about grooming children into situations were they can be drugged up and gangraped by middle-aged Pakistani men. Don't mix it up with something that is just going to dilute the effect. You are victimizing the girls all over again.
The report's publication comes after Starmer committed to launching a national inquiry into the abuse.
Here are some of the key findings of Baroness Casey's review.
Ethnicity of perpetrators 'still shied away from'
Despite years of concerns that ethnicity played an element in the abuse of predominately white girls by mostly men of Pakistani or Asian origin, the report finds that authorities "shied away" from this topic.
While the report notes that perpetrators and victims "come from all ethnic groups", it notes that in Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire, there has been a "disproportionality of group-based child sexual exploitation offending by men of Asian ethnicity".
Rates of collection and accuracy of ethnicity data are higher in these three police areas, the report says, noting that nationally, "ethnicity is shied away from despite being a question for many years and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators".
As a result, one of Casey's recommendations is for the government to "make mandatory the collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases and work with the police to improve the collection of ethnicity data for victims".
Rape charges involving under-16s being dropped or downgraded
Despite the age of consent being 16 in the UK, the review finds "too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges.
It says this has occurred where a 13 to 15-year-old had been perceived to be "in love with" or "had consented to" sex with the perpetrator.
This is due to a "grey area" in the law where, although any sexual activity with 13 to 15-year-olds is unlawful, the decision on whether to charge, and which offence to apply, is "more open to interpretation".
"The purpose is largely aimed at avoiding criminalising someone who reasonably believed a child was older than they were or criminalising relationships between teenagers," the review says.
However, in practice, this nuance in the law is being exploited by groomers.
The report recommends a change in the law so that adults who intentionally have penetrative sex with a child under 16 receive mandatory rape charges.
Taxi licensing loophole
Baroness Casey's report says that as a "key part of the nighttime economy", taxis have historically been identified as a way children can be at risk of sexual exploitation.
In Rotherham, one of the hotspots of the child grooming scandal, taxi drivers were said to have picked up girls from care homes to abuse.
Local authorities issue taxi licences in line with statutory guidance issued by the government, and hotspots for child grooming have gone "above and beyond" these standards, the report notes.
"However, they are being hindered by a lack of stringency elsewhere in the country, and legal loopholes which mean drivers can apply for a license anywhere in the country and then operate in another area," it adds.
As a result, Baroness Casey's report recommends that the Department for Transport "take immediate action to put a stop to 'out of area taxis' and bring in more rigorous statutory standards for local authority licensing and regulation of taxi drivers".
Scale of the problem is still unclear
Despite evidence of the grooming scandal emerging as far back as the early 2000s, the latest report says it was "unable to provide an assessment on the scale of group-based child sexual exploitation".
"There is no recent study of the prevalence of child sexual abuse and exploitation in the population," it adds.
"Confusing and inconsistently applied definitions and incomplete data across the police, local authorities, health and the criminal justice system, obscure it. The concept of ‘grooming gangs’, while well-known to the public, is not captured clearly in any official data set."
The review notes a figure from the new Complex and Organised Child Abuse Dataset, which has identified around 700 recorded offences of group-based child sexual exploitation in 2023.
However, "given how under-reported child sexual exploitation is, the flaws in the data collection and the confusing and inconsistently applied definitions, it is highly unlikely that this accurately reflects the true scale of child sexual exploitation, or group-based exploitation," the report says.
Why did Starmer announce the inquiry?
Last week, the prime minister said he had read "every single word" of an independent report into child sexual exploitation by Baroness Louise Casey and would accept her recommendation for the investigation.
Earlier this year, the government had dismissed calls for a public inquiry, saying its focus was on putting in place the outstanding recommendations already made in a seven-year national inquiry into various forms of child sexual abuse by Prof Alexis Jay.
Prof Jay's 2022 report concluded there had been institutional failings across the country and tens of thousands of victims in England and Wales.
But a national row over grooming gangs was ignited in January after tech billionaire Elon Musk used his X social media platform to launch a barrage of attacks on Starmer following the government's decision to decline a request from Oldham Council for a Whitehall-led inquiry into child sexual abuse in the town.
The government later commissioned a "rapid" audit by Baroness Casey into the nature and scale of group-based child sexual abuse.
What we know about the scope of the inquiry
The inquiry will be able to compel witnesses to give evidence, and it is understood that it will be national in scope, co-ordinating a series of targeted local investigations.
When asked when it would begin, the PM said it would be implemented under the Inquiries Act, which will take "a bit of time to sort out" and would be done in "an orderly way".
Meanwhile, asked if there will be an apology for people who were criticised for raising the issue of grooming gangs, chancellor Rachel Reeves said on Sunday: "What is the most important thing here? It's the victims.
"It's not people's hurt feelings about how they’ve been spoken about. The most important here is the victims of these evil crimes."
The beginnings of the grooming gangs scandal are centred on the town of Rotherham, where an inquiry found 1,400 girls were sexually exploited by grooming gangs between 1997 and 2013. Such gangs are believed to have operated in as many as 50 towns and cities.
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