A “raging” Baroness Louise Casey has vented her fury at the lack of action on grooming gangs in an emotional BBC Newsnight interview – saying that rape laws did not protect young girls. A bombshell report into the scandal revealed that crimes committed by Pakistani or Asian grooming gangs were covered up to avoid inflaming community tensions.
In her review, Baroness Casey – who investigated child sexual exploitation in Rotherham 10 years ago – said a “resistance and reluctance” to “acknowledge past mistakes, apologise and take action” led to immense suffering. And after hearing the heartbreaking stories of two victims who sat opposite her on the programme, she said: “What has really got to me a bit about doing this particular report is 10 years ago, I couldn’t have clearer about what was happening in Rotherham. I said at the time there are national implications, this isn’t the only place this is happening in.
“Then you can see over a long period of time that there have been lots of initiatives, lots of reviews, lots of this, lots of that, lots of reports, and yet it doesn’t feel like it’s come to anything.
Asked by presenter Victoria Derbyshire if she was angry, Baroness Casey replied: “Yeah, I am. I’m raging, actually, on behalf of the victims.
“It’s been awful to realise that as a society we still don’t see these girls as girls, we want to see them as wayward teenagers that are making difficult choices in their lives, that our rape laws don’t seem to protect them. That was something I discovered in Rotherham.”
In her report, Baroness Casey said officials feared being called racist if they spoke out against Asian or Pakistani grooming gangs.
It added: “Blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions all play a part in a collective failure to properly deter and prosecute offenders or to protect children from harm.”
Asylum seekers and foreign nationals were linked to a “significant proportion” of live grooming gang cases, the review found. An entire chapter of the Casey Review, called “Denial”, revealed how public bodies used “flawed data” to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs as sensationalised, biased or untrue”.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper apologised, on behalf of the Government, to victims of the grooming gangs scandal.
She and Sir Keir Starmer have also performed a U-turn to set up a national sex gangs inquiry, having previously said they would just establish local ones.
Ms Cooper told Parliament on Monday: “To the victims and survivors of sexual exploitation and grooming gangs, on behalf of this and past governments and the many public authorities who let you down, I want to reiterate an unequivocal apology for the unimaginable pain and suffering you have suffered and the failure of our country’s institutions through decades to prevent that harm and keep you safe.”