Labour has announced plans for a formal national inquiry into group-based child sexual exploitation, widely known as the grooming gangs scandal. The move follows an audit by Baroness Louise Casey, which found that public bodies had repeatedly failed to confront evidence that, in several parts of the country, the perpetrators of these offences were disproportionately men of Pakistani heritage.
Delivering a statement to the Commons on 16 June, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper described the offences as “horrific”, noting that children as young as ten were “brutally raped by gangs of men and disgracefully let down again and again by the authorities”. The review also concluded that fear of appearing politically incorrect had led to institutional reluctance to record or discuss the ethnic pattern of offending, with serious consequences for victims.
Earlier this year, Sir Keir Starmer rejected calls from campaigners and MPs for a statutory inquiry, opting instead for a rapid, non-statutory audit to be completed within six months. Led by Baroness Casey, the review assessed the scale, nature, and institutional handling of the grooming gangs phenomenon. Its findings left him no alternative but to reverse course.
Drawing on police, safeguarding, and criminal justice data, the audit confirmed that child sexual exploitation remains widespread and chronically mishandled. Although national prevalence data is incomplete, police recorded approximately 17,100 child sexual exploitation offences in 2024. A separate dataset on organised abuse also logged around 700 group-based incidents in 2023. Describing this already alarming picture as “fragmented and incomplete”, the audit criticised successive governments for failing to establish a consistent national picture.
The patterns documented in the report echo those seen in earlier cases such as Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford: white, working-class girls — some in care, many from troubled backgrounds, all vulnerable — targeted by groups of older men who groomed and repeatedly raped them, before trafficking them for others to abuse.
Baroness Casey’s review noted that the ethnicity of perpetrators is still not recorded in two-thirds of cases and has routinely been downplayed or “shied away from”. That characterisation is accurate. In a Sky News interview following publication, she recalled a case in which the word “Pakistani” had been literally tippexed out of a child protection file in Rotherham.
This culture of omission, the review concludes, has contributed to a wider pattern of avoidance. “Blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions,” Casey writes, “all play a part in a collective failure to properly deter and prosecute offenders or to protect children from harm.”
Not that this should have come as news to anyone following the story.
The 2014 Jay Inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013 found that girls as young as 11 were “raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated”. There were also examples of children “who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone”. In the same town, a senior police officer is reported to have remarked: “With it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.”
The 2022 Telford Independent Inquiry, commissioned by the council after years of allegations, concluded that “there was a nervousness about race… bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community”. The report also noted “a feeling that certain individuals in the Asian community were not targeted for investigation into child exploitation because it would have been too ‘politically incorrect’”. Between 2006 and 2008, senior managers within the council expressed concern that allegations about Asian men involved in grooming gangs “had the potential to start a ‘race riot’”.
That same reluctance to confront the truth was documented in Casey’s earlier 2015 report into Rotherham Council, which focused on crimes committed primarily by men of Pakistani heritage. She described a “council in denial”, where “so-called political correctness” had “cast its shadow” over decision-making. One witness said the council was “terrified of [the impact on] community cohesion”. Another was more blunt: “Asian men very powerful, and the white British are very mindful of racism and frightened of racism allegations so there is no robust challenge”. Across the town, staff were pressured to “suppress, keep quiet or cover up” concerns about grooming gangs.
But if institutional reluctance to acknowledge uncomfortable facts is a central theme of Casey’s audit, it is not one confined to local authorities. For years, progressive politicians on both sides of the House of Commons have dismissed concerns about grooming gangs as little more than a cover for far-Right agitation.
At a press conference on 6 January 2025, just days before the government commissioned the Casey audit, Sir Keir described calls for a national inquiry as “jumping on the bandwagon of the far-Right”.
Two days later, when Labour MPs were whipped to vote against a motion tabled by Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch calling for such an inquiry, the motion was defeated.
Others in the party adopted a similar tone to their leader. In a radio discussion, Lucy Powell, the Leader of the House of Commons, was asked by commentator Tim Montgomerie whether she had seen a Channel 4 documentary about five girls who had been sexually abused by grooming gangs. Powell replied: “Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Yeah, OK, let’s get that dog whistle out.”
As to where this rhetorical association between public concern about child sexual exploitation and the prejudices of the far-Right originates, part of the answer lies in Islamophobia Defined, the 2018 report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims.
In many ways, the report distilled years of political sensitivity, cultural caution and a creeping relativism already evident in earlier inquiries.
Co-chaired by Wes Streeting and Anna Soubry, the APPG proposed a new definition of Islamophobia: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. Its accompanying guidance lists examples of what it considers to be Islamophobic tropes. Among them is the suggestion that Muslim men target white girls in grooming gangs, which the report describes as a “subtle form of anti-Muslim racism”, and “a modern-day iteration” of “age-old stereotypes and tropes about Islam and Muslims”.
This framing has had significant downstream effects. The definition was formally adopted by the Labour Party in 2019, and later by the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, the Green Party, Plaid Cymru, and the Scottish Conservatives.
By 2023, at least 52 local authorities in England — approximately one in six — had adopted the APPG definition. In several of these areas, including those directly affected by grooming gang scandals, councillors and council staff are subject to internal disciplinary codes that incorporate its terms. The Free Speech Union, which has defended individuals in such cases, has documented multiple instances of councillors being investigated for speech that, while perfectly lawful, was alleged to fall foul of the APPG standard.
Still, Casey’s review has at least prompted action. A new national inquiry, expected to last three years, will coordinate local investigations in areas where cover-ups occurred. It will have statutory powers to compel witnesses, and will draw on evidence from victims, police, and the National Crime Agency. More than 1,000 unresolved cases may be revisited.
But does any of this address the underlying problem that for at least three decades, people have been afraid to “rock the multicultural boat”, as one whistleblower later recalled being told?
That question feels especially pressing given that, on the very day the inquiry was announced, the government’s new working group on Islamophobia launched a call for evidence. The group has been asked to develop a non-statutory definition of Islamophobia to inform future policy and “help Ministers and other relevant bodies understand what constitutes unacceptable treatment and prejudice against Muslim communities”.
One of the group’s members is Baroness Shaista Gohir, who in 2013 authored a report expressing concern about the “disproportionate media coverage being given to British Pakistani offenders”. She warned that such coverage had allowed “right-wing popular groups” to exploit the issue to “fuel racism and Islamophobia”, while ignoring the fact that “sexual exploitation occurs in every community and that the majority of offenders are White”.
And the chair of the group? Dominic Grieve KC, the Conservative MP and former Attorney General. By a curious coincidence, Mr Grieve also authored the foreword to the APPG’s Islamophobia Defined report, in which he described the document as making “an important contribution to the debate as to how Islamophobia can best be addressed”.
The government’s newly announced national inquiry into the grooming gangs is undoubtedly a step forward. But the question now is whether, when it reports in three years’ time, it will do so within a culture still governed by a definition of Islamophobia that risks chilling the speech of those whose voices, experiences and testimony are of incalculable value to any liberal democracy worthy of the name.
