The Casey report reveals fifteen years of establishment denial

New Statesman​

17-06-2025

Kirsty O'Connor -Eight years ago, when the BBC drama Three Girls was released in May 2017, the UK watched in horror. Reviewers described the series as 'powerful and brave' – it attracted more than 8.24m viewers. The drama, which was set in Rochdale (but could as easily have been based on events in Telford, Rotherham or Oxford) told the story of three teenage girls; each the victim of a grooming gang and subjected to institutional gaslighting which still goes on today. All were under the age of 16 and all were routinely raped and abused by men in their local community, all of whom were of Pakistani heritage. Despite widespread knowledge of the gravity of this long-running scandal (investigations stretch back to the late 1980s) victims of this heinous abuse still feel that little tangible action has been taken.
'One thing is abundantly clear; we as a society owe these women a debt,' Louise Casey wrote in the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse which was published on 16 June. Casey's report was commissioned by Keir Starmer in January, after the Labour government came under extreme pressure to hold an inquiry into the Grooming Gangs scandal. Outrage was triggered by posts on X by the platform's owner, Elon Musk, who accused Starmer, and the Home Office Minister, Jess Philips of being complicit in a cover up of the scale of the abuse. In the months since, the government has repeatedly refused to hold a national inquiry, saying that councils would be best placed to investigate the issue at a local level instead.
That was until Sunday, when Starmer, surrounded by reporters on a flight to the G7 meeting in Canada, quietly let slip that the government had changed its mind: there will be a national inquiry. This U-turn was, in no uncertain terms, due to the findings of Casey's report, which directly recommends that an investigation should be held. But it has left Labour MPs reeling. For months, MPs have been forced out on the defensive telling concerned constituents, many of whom were adamant of the need for an inquiry, that it wasn't necessary to hold one. As one insider told me, many MPs now feel that residents who were likely to feel mistrustful of the government on this have been pushed further away.
Another enraged back-bench MP said: 'I'm properly pissed off… I've had far right leaflets going around saying I voted against an inquiry and now we're having one.' They added: 'It's what happens when you have a govt on a death spiral and simply reacting to what it thinks the public wants. Weak, weak, weak.'
The report is damning. And the strength of its findings have clearly (and rightly) forced Starmer's hand. 'We need a vigorous approach to righting the wrongs of the past,' Casey wrote, 'using known vulnerability factors to identify and bring perpetrators of these terrible offences to justice; holding agencies to account for any part they played… and delivering justice for more victims.'
These 'known vulnerability factors' are two-fold. The first relates to the 'collective failure to address questions about the ethnicity of grooming gangs'. In other words, Casey found that the institutions' (the police, social services, and councils) whose job it was to ensure they had completed a thorough investigation into those involved in grooming gangs, utterly let down those whom they are supposed to protect. The ethnicity of perpetrators was, according to Casey 'shied away from' for fear of appearing racist.
As a result, ethnicity data remains unrecorded for 'two-thirds' of perpetrators with 'flawed data' being used to 'repeatedly dismiss claims about 'Asian grooming gangs' as sensationalised, biased or untrue'. Casey said: 'This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.' When it looked at the data held in three local areas, the report found evidence that men of Asian ethnicity are over-represented as perpetrators in group-based child sexual exploitation in those areas.
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The second 'known vulnerability factor' is what Casey terms, the adultification of the teenage victims of grooming gangs. Due to prejudice, classism and misogyny – victims of child sexual abuse (many of whom grew up in care) are still treated with 'uneasiness and awkwardness' by some professionals who seem to find these cases 'less easy to deal with without applying judgements or stereotypes than…exploitation involving…drugs, knives or money'. This could manifest in their not being believed or the key signs of exploitation being missed: it is much easier for a police officer to realise that a child is being criminally exploited after finding them with drugs, than it is to spot the subtle signs of sexual abuse. Indeed, some victims have been criminally prosecuted for things they did under coercion, for example, encouraging another child to come with them. 'Children need to be seen as children,' Casey wrote, 'We let them down when we treat them or see them as adults'.
Casey's review also found that despite the age of consent being 16, there have been 'too many examples' of child sexual abuse cases being either downgraded from rape to lesser charges or dropped altogether in cases in which it had been argued that a 13–15-year-old had been 'in love with' or had consented to sex with the perpetrator. This is despite a known technique used by men involved in grooming gangs encouraging victims (who are often vulnerable or neglected and desperately seeking love) into thinking they are their 'boyfriend'. The review recommends that the law in in England and Wales should be changed so adults who intentionally 'penetrate the vagina, anus or mouth of a child under 16 receive mandatory charges of rape'.
Whatever happens next, this report is not good news for Starmer. After spending at least half of his premiership convincing the public, his detractors and even his own MPs that an inquiry doesn't need to be held, he has changed his mind at the last minute. Casey's exhaustive report – sensitively done and uncompromising in its call for change – is a turning point.
[See more: A new force is stirring on the left]
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