The ethnicity and nationality of all suspects in child sexual abuse and exploitation cases in Britain will be recorded by the police under new mandatory reporting rules, the British home secretary told Parliament on Monday.
The requirement was one of the recommendations of a government-commissioned review into a decades-long scandal in Britain involving so-called grooming gangs. The term refers to the sexual exploitation of young girls by groups of men in several towns and cities, which first came to widespread public attention in the early 2010s.
Most of the perpetrators in the largest criminal prosecutions so far have been of Pakistani heritage. The author of the review, Louise Casey, a member of the House of Lords who has conducted several inquiries into institutional failings, said that instead of investigating the ethnicity issue, many organisations had avoided the topic “for fear of appearing racist” or raising community tensions.
She added that while “a lot of attention” had been given to the issue of grooming gangs and “reviews, inquiries and reports have made recommendations”, they had not been acted on forcefully enough.
Casey’s review made 12 recommendations, which she said would allow the country “to draw a line in the sand” and “make sure we do not end up back here again in a few years’ time”.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper said the government would carry out all the proposals, including changing the law to ensure that any adult who engaged in penetrative sex with a child under 16 would be charged with rape, even if the child was perceived to have been “in love with” the perpetrator, and establishing the “formal requirement” for the police to collect ethnicity and nationality data.
Men of Asian and Pakistani ethnicity were “disproportionately represented” among grooming gangs in three areas examined in her review, Casey said. But she added that the data was “not sufficient to allow any conclusions to be drawn at the national level”.
“The ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators,” she wrote. This created an information “vacuum” that let people with “malicious intent sow and spread hatred”, she said, while “victims are left forgotten, a sideshow as data is used to suit each side’s own ends”.
Holly Archer, who was among the child victims of a grooming gang that operated in the Midlands town of Telford, England, in the 2000s, criticized what she called political “point scoring” and called for lawmakers to leave their differences “at the wayside” and work together.
“Victims have been left behind every time when child sexual exploitation hits the headlines; it’s draining emotionally,” she told The New York Times. “I hope this is the beginning of the end of this tug of war with vulnerable women.”
On Saturday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that the government would agree to Casey’s call for a full national inquiry — a years-old issue brought back to public attention by the tech billionaire Elon Musk in vitriolic social media posts in January.
The Labour government previously resisted such an inquiry, saying it was focused on carrying out recommendations from a previous seven-year inquiry into child sexual abuse, which ended in 2022.
Casey’s report described a form of abuse known as the “boyfriend model”, in which men target often-vulnerable children, such as those in foster care institutions.
New York Times News Service