The United Kingdom has launched a national enquiry into group-based child sexual exploitation following a damning audit that revealed systemic failures in tackling abuse involving some Pakistani-heritage men, amid fears of racism allegations and community tensions.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper addressed Parliament on Monday, outlining the findings of the National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, led by Baroness Louise Casey.
The audit reviewed cases across three police forces and identified a clear over-representation of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men among suspects. It also criticised police, social services and other authorities for failing to confront the issue of ethnicity for fear of being perceived as racist or stoking division.
“In the local data that the audit examined, they identified clear evidence of over-representation amongst suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage,” Cooper said, quoting the report. “She refers to examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions.”
Cooper acknowledged that the vast majority of British Asian and Pakistani-heritage communities are “appalled” by such crimes and stressed the importance of bringing perpetrators to justice.
She offered an “unequivocal apology” to victims and announced legal reforms, including the tightening of rape laws and plans to quash past convictions of girls previously labelled as child prostitutes.
The audit, spanning 197 pages, said the phrase “group-based child sexual exploitation” was a “sanitised” term for brutal crimes involving “multiple sexual assaults committed against children by multiple men on multiple occasions.”
It cited examples of severe abuse, including forced abortions, sexually transmitted infections, and babies taken from victims at birth.
The report called for accurate documentation of offenders’ ethnic backgrounds and urged authorities to treat all exploited minors as children first, not as delinquents or suspects.
It sharply criticised the reluctance to acknowledge race-related factors, stating that silence on the issue had allowed harmful myths to flourish and failed victims seeking justice.
The national enquiry will investigate decades of institutional failures, which Cooper attributed to “blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions.”
The move follows Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s pledge over the weekend to implement all 12 recommendations made by Baroness Casey, including the formal launch of the nationwide investigation.
The issue returned to the public spotlight earlier this year when Tesla CEO Elon Musk publicly criticised the UK’s handling of past grooming gang scandals.
The audit was commissioned shortly thereafter and has since challenged long-standing assumptions that grooming gangs were predominantly white, concluding that such claims “cannot be proved” and may have caused additional harm.
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