It was described by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper as ‘a timeline of failure from 2009 to 2025’ which shamed Britain.
For decades, victims have been ignored while grooming gangs have been left free to walk the streets due to ‘blindness, ignorance, prejudice and defensiveness’.
Here, the Mail dissects the key findings in Baroness Casey’s damning 200-page report.
Lack of data
Efforts to understand and tackle grooming gangs have been hampered by a misguided fear that examining the ethnic background of abusers could be deemed racist, Baroness Casey found.
Analysis of safeguarding reviews into grooming gang offences found ‘a palpable discomfort in any discussion of ethnicity in most of them’.
Yet separate examination of the offenders’ profiles revealed that ‘a high proportion of the perpetrators in these cases were from Asian ethnic backgrounds’.
Lady Casey’s audit highlights how ‘report after report criticises the lack of ethnicity data and calls for better data collection and research into ethnicity and cultural issues’.
Baroness Louise Casey said report after report criticises the lack of ethnicity data
Lady Casey has called for better data collection and research into ethnicity and cultural issues
Meanwhile, too many well-intentioned initiatives to tackle grooming gangs ‘have been dropped or superseded, or simply faded away, never to be heard from again’.
In a hard-hitting rebuke to professionals and commentators who have tried to silence debate on the grooming gangs, she writes: ‘It is not racist to want to examine the ethnicity of offenders.
‘The people who downplay the ethnicity of perpetrators are continuing to let down society, local communities and victims – past and future – by not looking harder at the nature of offending in order to better understand it and better prevent it.’
Ethnicity data on suspects
Grooming suspects in major northern towns and cities are at least twice as likely to be Asian as white, the report said.
According to the baroness’s report, recording the ‘ethnicity of perpetrators’ continues to be ‘shied away from’.
But analysis of child sexual exploitation suspects in Greater Manchester found that between 52 and 54 per cent were Asian, despite representing 20.9 per cent of the area’s population in 2021.
In West Yorkshire, 35 per cent of suspects were Asian compared to 16 per cent of the county’s population. This suggested ‘a disproportionate over-representation of people of Asian ethnic background (roughly double) and disproportionately under-representation of people of White ethnicity (roughly half) amongst child sexual exploitation suspects’, Lady Casey wrote.
(Left to right) Shaha Joman Miah, Shaha Amran Miah and Shaha Alman Miah were jailed for abusing girls
And statistics from Operation Stovewood – launched after the landmark Jay Report found that at least 1,400 girls were abused by gangs of men of mainly Pakistani heritage in Rotherham – found that nearly two-thirds were recorded as coming from a Pakistani ethnic background.
By contrast, just 4 per cent of the South Yorkshire town’s population were of Pakistani ethnicity. ‘The question of the ethnicity of perpetrators has been a key question for this audit, having been raised in inquiries and reports going back many years,’ she wrote.
‘More effort is required to identify the nature of group-based child sexual exploitation and, in particular, the ethnicity of perpetrators and offender motivations, in order to understand it better, and to tackle it more effectively.’
Ethnicity data on victims
Victims of child sexual abuse and exploitation are overwhelmingly white, according to police data analysed by Baroness Casey.
Of those whose ethnicity is recorded, 87 per cent were identified as white, 4 per cent as black, 4 per cent as Asian and 3 per cent as Chinese or ‘other’.
However ethnicity was only recorded for 35 per cent of victims, leaving the origin of almost two-thirds unknown – meaning it was ‘not possible to draw any conclusions’ from this data.
But the over-representation of white victims was even more pronounced when Lady Casey drilled down into individual police probes into grooming gangs. In Greater Manchester, out of 317 known victims of 35 different investigations, 298 were white – or 94 per cent. Five out of six were girls.
Ethnicity was only recorded for 35 per cent of victims, leaving the origin of almost two-thirds unknown
Scale of abuse
Horrifyingly, about 500,000 children a year are likely to experience child sexual abuse – of any kind – according to the audit.
But it says that for the vast majority, their abuse is not identified, and it is not reported to the police either at the time or later.
Of just over 100,000 offences of child sexual abuse and exploitation recorded by police in 2024, around 60 per cent involved ‘contact’ between offender and victim while the rest took place online.
Highlighting the need for a thorough inquiry into organised grooming, the audit says the only reliable figure on ‘group-based child sexual exploitation’ comes from the new ‘Complex and Organised Child Abuse Dataset’. It identified only around 700 such offences in 2023.
‘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,’ Lady Casey writes. ‘It is a failure of public policy over many years that there remains such limited reliable data in this area.’
Lady Casey said the vast majority of abuse is not reported to the police either at the time or later (pictured: Elland Road police station)
Child protection failures
The report expresses concern over a disconnect between police data on child sex abuse cases – which are on the rise – with child protection plans for sexual abuse, which are at a 30-year low. Lady Casey found social workers were unwilling to place children on protection plans for sexual abuse, preferring to categorise it as neglect.
Her audit found a ‘recent’ case involving ‘a 13-year-old girl who had been raped by three different men but was on a child protection plan for neglect’.
She highlights one safeguarding review which found that professionals ‘do not always feel confident to ask children about child sexual abuse’. This matters because it means ‘they may not be receiving the right kind of protection’, she writes.
According to Lady Casey, children’s services still ‘fail too often to spot these factors and evidence of grooming and exploitation taking place’.
These include ‘obvious signs such as unexplained gifts or older men picking girls up from care homes’. Shockingly – if unsurprisingly – her analysis of serious-case reviews following cases of child sexual exploitation found that two-thirds of victims were in local authority care.
Their abuse ‘often’ started while they were in care.
‘So on this basis, being in care is a “risk factor” for exploitation, not a protective factor.’
Lady Casey also says an attitude that ‘children who went missing from care were treated with less urgency because “they always came back”’ – a key finding of Professor Alexis Jay’s 2014 report into the Rotherham grooming scandal – continues to ‘persist’.
Such children ‘do not set off the same alarm bells that a parent might feel on losing contact with their child’, she added.
Lady Casey found social workers were unwilling to place children on protection plans for sexual abuse
Asylum and overseas offenders
The audit uncovered live grooming investigations in which asylum seekers or foreign nationals form a ‘significant proportion’ of suspects. Lady Casey had access to ‘around a dozen live, complex, group-based child sexual exploitation police operations, the full details of which cannot be included in this report so as not to prejudice any future criminal justice outcomes’.
She added: ‘While the future outcomes of these investigations remain unknown, and the number of live, open cases we had access to was limited, this audit noted that a significant proportion of these cases appear to involve suspects who are non-UK nationals and/or who are claiming asylum in the UK.’ In addition, several of these live operations involve an overlap between child sexual exploitation and child criminal exploitation, she adds.
Close taxi licensing loophole
The report stresses that ‘most taxi drivers are law-abiding people providing an important service to the public’.
However, as has repeatedly been exposed when grooming gangs have finally been brought to justice, as a ‘key part of the nighttime economy’ they have ‘historically been identified as a way children can be at risk of sexual exploitation’.
Councils issue taxi licences in line with statutory guidance.
But the audit highlights how, in some areas with recognised problems of child sexual exploitation, local authorities go ‘above and beyond’ to provide ‘additional protection for children’.
‘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,’ Lady Casey writes.
‘The Department for Transport should close this loophole immediately and introduce more rigorous standards.’
Lady Casey said loopholes in taxi licensing needs to be closed in order to protect potential victims
Criminalising victims
Victims of grooming gangs who have been prosecuted for child prostitution should have their convictions overturned, the baroness said.
She compared the scandal to the sub-postmasters caught up in the Horizon furore, saying child victims have wrongly been prosecuted for criminal damage or inciting sexual activity by bringing other girls to be abused.
It was only in 2015 that the term ‘child prostitution’ was removed from legislation and replaced with ‘child sexual exploitation’.
Between 1989 and 1995, almost 4,000 police cautions were given to children between ten and 18 for offences relating to prostitution.
