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Yvette Cooper has condemned damning failures by the authorities to protect children from grooming gangs as she announced there would be a formal requirement on police for the first time to collect ethnicity and nationality data for all cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation.
The home secretary confirmed the government would accept all 12 recommendations of Louise Casey’s rapid review, including setting up a statutory inquiry into institutional failures, marking a significant reversal after months of pressure on Labour to act.
In her rapid review, Lady Casey found evidence of “over-representation” of Asian and Pakistani heritage men among suspects in local data – collected in Greater Manchester, West and South Yorkshire – and criticised a continued failure to gather robust data at a national level.
She found evidence that some authorities refused to take into account the ethnicity of offenders out of fear of appearing racist, and said “blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good, but misdirected intentions, all played a part in this collective failure”.
“While much more robust national data is needed, we cannot and must not shy away from these findings, because, as Baroness Casey says, ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities,” Cooper said.
“The vast majority of people in our British, Asian and Pakistani heritage communities continue to be appalled by these terrible crimes and agree that the criminal minority of sick predators and perpetrators in every community must be dealt with robustly by a criminal law.”
The law will be strengthened so that any individual convicted of sexual offences would be excluded from the asylum system and denied refugee status, after the Casey review uncovered cases involving suspects who were asylum seekers.
There would also be a legal change so that adult men who have penetrative sex with 13- to 15-year-olds would receive the most serious rape charges.
“The sexual exploitation of children by grooming gangs is one of the most horrific crimes. Children as young as 10 plied with drugs and alcohol, brutally raped by gangs of men and disgracefully let down again and again by the authorities who were meant to protect them and keep them safe,” Cooper told MPs.
“Those vile perpetrators who have grown used to the authorities looking the other way, must have no place to hide,” she added, as she offered an unconditional apology to victims from current and past governments.
“These findings are deeply disturbing, but most disturbing of all, as Baroness Casey makes clear, is the fact that too many of these findings are not new. We have lost more than a decade. That must end now.”
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In her statement, the home secretary criticised organisations which for decades had “looked the other way” instead of protecting vulnerable children, many of whom were singled out for grooming, while their perpetrators walked free.
The Home Office will now commission new research into the cultural and social drivers of child sexual exploitation, misogyny and violence against women and girls.
The National Crime Agency, the UK’s top investigative body, has been tasked with leading a coordinated national push to reopen historic group-based child sexual abuse cases and identify offenders who slipped through the cracks of previous police efforts.
More than 800 cases have now been identified for formal review, with the figure expected to rise above 1,000 in the coming weeks.
Further local investigations will be directed and overseen by a national commission with statutory inquiry powers, which will be time limited and, Cooper said, challenge continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies.
