 "A woman poses at her home in England, Britain, January 8, 2025. She was 14 when she was sexually abused by a grooming gang in Rochdale. Source: Reuters")
The UK authorities deliberately concealed the ethnicity of perpetrators in cases related to notorious grooming gangs to avoid “raising community tensions” and “appearing racist,” an audit report, published Monday (June 16), revealed.
The rapid national audit of the grooming gangs was ordered by PM Keir Starmer in February this year.
The report revealed that the ethnicity of the perpetrators was not even collected by the authorities in ’two-thirds’ of the cases.
It further revealed that a 2020 home office report, which claimed the majority of the perpetrators were white, was based on flawed data.
Baroness Casey, who headed the audit, said investigators found over-representation of men with “Asian ethnicity” upon examination of data from three police forces that had registered the ethnicity.
“More often than not, the official reports do not discuss the perpetrators, let alone their ethnicity or any cultural drivers. There is a palpable discomfort in any discussion of ethnicity in most of them. Where ethnicity is mentioned, it is referred to in euphemisms such as ‘the local community’, or it is buried deep in the report,” she wrote in the report.
She wrote that it was “not racist” to examine the ethnicity of sexual offenders.
The audit report urged the authorities to make it mandatory for police forces to record the ethnicity of the accused.
Impact Shorts
More Shorts‘White girls not the only victims’
She revealed that white girls were not the only victims of these grooming gangs but also children belonging to Sikh and Hindu cultures.
“This audit received representations about the need to examine further cultural and religious drivers behind child sexual exploitation, including concerns that Sikh and Hindu children had been targeted for abuse because they were ‘easy targets’ and who would never tell anyone about being exploited because of the shame,” Casey wrote.
She also suggested that the National Crime Agency should take charge of investigations, a national inquiry be launched, adults engaging in penetrative sex with children under 16 always face rape charges, and the government commission research into the drivers and cultural factors.
In January, Labour MPs had opposed a national inquiry into grooming gangs, with Starmer labelling those advocating for it as “jumping on a bandwagon of the far-right.”
The audit prompted UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to make a dramatic U-turn, announcing a national inquiry over the weekend before the report’s release, agreeing to adopt all 12 recommendations. The report further revealed that in ongoing cases, a “significant number” of men involved in grooming gangs are non-UK nationals and asylum seekers.