Alumna Baroness Casey authors major report into grooming gangs
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A major report into grooming gangs by Goldsmiths alumnus Baroness Casey has prompted the government to call a national inquiry into the issue.
Baroness Casey addresses MPs at a Westminster hearing after publication of her report
The National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse was led by Baroness Casey of Blackstock DBE CB, a BA History graduate.
Writing in the foreword to the 197-page report, crossbench peer Baroness Casey said: “The British public are rightly appalled when they hear of group-based child sexual exploitation and expect it to be investigated thoroughly, offenders brought to justice and punished severely.
“They, undoubtedly, also expect that this country has the right systems in place to understand child sexual exploitation: why it is happening, where it is happening and who is perpetrating it, so we can seek not only to tackle it when it occurs but so that we can prevent it from happening in the first place.
“To prevent it we have to understand it. We have failed in our duty to do that to date."
The national audit sets out 12 recommendations to tackle the issue of grooming gangs which were accepted by the government, including a full national inquiry. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the inquiry “will go wherever it needs to go”.
The report added that “blindness, ignorance and prejudice” led to repeated failures over decades to properly investigate cases in which children were abused by grooming gangs.
Baroness Casey said for too long the authorities had shied away from the ethnicity of the people involved, adding it was “not racist to examine the ethnicity of the offenders”.
The report found evidence of “over-representation” of Asian and Pakistani heritage men among suspects in local data – collected in Greater Manchester, West and South Yorkshire – and criticised a continued failure to gather robust data at a national level.
Speaking in Westminster at the launch of the report, Baroness Casey called for an end to “political football” over the scandal, adding: “I think it would be a real shame if politicians from the opposition parties and people in wider society didn’t see that this is a chance to create a national reset, that the only thing that really matters is the protection of children."