Grooming gangs report author says 'do-gooders' giving racists 'more ammunition'

Ignoring the ethnicity of grooming gang perpetrators gives racists "more ammunition", the author of a new report has said.

Baroness Louise Casey told Sky News' Politics with Sophy Ridge there was a particular issue with some British Asian men that was "abundantly clear" in data analysed from three police forces; West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester; which showed a "disproportionately" in child sexual exploitation.

Politics latest: Reaction to 'damning' grooming gangs report

But she added: "Just to give some sort of balance, in Greater Manchester I asked for data on child sexual exploitation that took me to Asian heritage. I asked for data on child abuse and that took me to the general population, which is largely white."

Baroness Casey said "if we just establish the facts, then you can take the pain out of this".

"I think you've got sort of do-gooders that don't really want this to be found because, you know, 'Oh, God, then all the racists are going to be more racist'," she added.

"Well, actually, people that are racist are going to use this anyway. All you're doing with the hate mongers and the racists is giving them more ammunition."

Asked if people were worried about being seen as racist, the cross-bench peer said she came across direct examples of this in Rotherham - one of the towns at the centre of the grooming gangs scandal.

"I was following through on a children's file in archive and found the word 'Pakistani' tippexed out," Baroness Casey said.

"I thought whoever did that inadvertently was giving ammunition to the English Defence League that were every week, in and out, campaigning and doing their stuff in that town.

"I think the problem is that people are worried about being called racist.... if good people don't grasp difficult things, bad people will, and that's why we have to do it as a society."

The government has announced there will be a full statutory inquiry into grooming gangs, as recommended by Baroness Casey's report.

The government has also accepted her recommendations to introduce compulsory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in grooming cases, and for a review of police records to launch new criminal investigations into historic child sexual exploitation cases.

Baroness Casey was asked to produce an audit of sexual abuse carried out by grooming gangs in England and Wales, looking specifically at the issue of ethnicity and the cultural and social drivers for this type of offending.

This had never before been done despite multiple local reviews into child sexual exploitation and a seven-year national inquiry into child abuse more generally, known as the Jay Review, which concluded in 2022.

The government had previously resisted calls for an inquiry into grooming gangs, after a row with tech billionaire Elon Musk brought the issue back into the spotlight in January, saying it would implement the recommendations of the Jay Review that the Tories didn't.

However it changed its position following Baroness Casey's findings.

Read more:Officials tried to cover up grooming scandal, says CummingsWhy many victims welcome national inquiry into grooming gangsGrooming gangs scandal timeline

She found that flawed data has been used repeatedly to dismiss claims about "Asian grooming gangs".

Having examined local data in three police force areas, she found "disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds" are among suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as a "significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity" who have been identified in local reviews and child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country.

She said all of this warranted further examination, insisting to Sophy Ridge that the decision was not political.

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Baroness Casey has also called for a tightening of the laws around the age of consent so that any penetrative sexual activity with a child under 16 is classified as rape, which the government has also accepted.

She told Sophy Ridge that some perpetrators waited until their victims turned 13 as then it is "much harder to prosecute for rape".

She said: "I think we have to be really clear in society that children are children and I don't see the difference between, you know, a four-year-old and a 14-year-old. If somebody is doing to them... what I talk about in my report, it's rape and we need to call it for what it is."