The British government has announced a national inquiry into organised child sexual abuse following the release of a damning report by Baroness Louise Casey that criticised decades of institutional failure to protect children from so-called “grooming gangs”.
It marks a remarkable U-turn by the Labour Party government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which had resisted months of calls for an inquiry, stating that it was focusing on recommendations already made in an earlier seven-year probe.
But what exactly is the Casey Report, and what drove Labour’s abrupt change of course?
What is the Casey Report?
Commissioned earlier this year by Starmer, the Casey Report is a review of how United Kingdom institutions have tackled child sexual exploitation.
The review focused on “grooming gangs” – groups of men who targeted vulnerable girls for sexual abuse, often over extended periods of time.
What does the report say?
The report identified an institutional failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, exploitation and serious violence.
Among its recommendations, the Casey Report suggested a change in the law so adults in England and Wales face mandatory rape charges if they intentionally penetrate a child under age 16.
In her report, Casey concluded that too many grooming cases have been dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges because a 13- to 15-year-old is perceived to have been “in love with” or have “consented to” sex with the perpetrator.
Her review also highlighted reluctance by the authorities to “examine the ethnicity of the offenders”, saying it was not racist to do so.
In the local data that the audit examined from three police forces, they identified clear evidence of “over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men”.
However, the review also criticised the ongoing failure to collect ethnicity at a national level, with it not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, making it impossible “to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data”.
Were the recommendations accepted?
Yes.
The UK’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper confirmed the government would accept all 12 recommendations in the Casey Report.
This means the police will launch a new national criminal operation targeting grooming gangs, overseen by the National Crime Agency (NCA).
This operation would be overseen by an independent commission with powers to compel witnesses to provide evidence.
It would also go ahead with a national inquiry, with Starmer stating that he had read “every single word” of the report and would accept Casey’s recommendation for an investigation.
What led to Labour’s U-turn?
Richard Scorer, the head of Abuse Law and Public Inquiries at Slater and Gordon, a law firm, told Al Jazeera that the sheer size of the scandal and the fact that it had affected thousands of children made it “inevitable” that there would need to be a public inquiry about it at some point.
US billionaire Elon Musk’s online references to the grooming scandal that emerged a decade ago in several towns and cities in northern England had also pushed the “issue up the political agenda”, he said.
In June 2022, an independent review found that the police and local council had failed to prevent sexual exploitation of young girls by gangs in Oldham, a town in Greater Manchester in England.
Two years later, political leaders in Oldham Council called for the government to investigate further, but then-Home Office Minister Jess Phillips rejected the council’s request, saying it should lead an investigation itself.
In January this year, Musk threw his weight behind far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name Tommy Robinson and had been outspoken on the issue.
He called for Robinson, a controversial political figure, then serving an 18-month jail term for contempt of court, to be freed, writing on his own social media platform X, “Why is Tommy Robinson in a solitary confinement prison for telling the truth?”
Musk also accused Starmer of failing to prosecute child rapists when he was director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013.
He also took aim at Minister for Safeguarding Jess Phillips, calling her “a rape genocide apologist”.
Starmer responded at the time, without mentioning Musk by name. “Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible are not interested in victims, they are interested in themselves,” the PM said.
Will this report bring about change?
Experts say it’s certainly a positive step.
William Tantam, a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Bristol, who has worked on a previous independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, said that from a researcher’s perspective, the main positive was that there would be more consistency and clarity in data.
He said that another positive is that inquiry panel will have the authority to compel agencies to participate.
Scorer noted that bringing in the NCA to investigate cases that haven’t progressed in the past is also a very welcome outcome of the report.
He said in the UK, different police forces have not always succeeded in coordinating their efforts to tackle grooming gangs, so a more centralised overview from the NCA might secure “a better coordination of police activity”.
Cooper told Parliament on Monday that more than 800 cases have now been identified for formal review, and she expects that figure to rise above 1,000 in the coming weeks.
But Scorer warned that the government would need to assign an additional budget for the implementation of the changes recommended by Casey.
“If you are asking the NCA to reopen and investigate, potentially up to 1000 cases, that’s going to require a huge amount of resources,” he said. “Who’s going to pay for that? That’s one of the questions that the government is going to need to answer.”