Key lines from Casey's grooming gangs reportpublished at 16:06
16:06
We’ve now received the report written by Baroness Louise Casey and being discussed by MPs in the House of Commons.
It's about 200 pages long - we're working through it but here’s some of the key lines we've picked out so far:
- “Child sexual exploitation is horrendous whoever commits it, but there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination. Instead of examination, we have seen obfuscation,” Baroness Casey says
- She says the ethnicity data collected for victims and perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation “is not sufficient to allow any conclusions to be drawn at the national level”
- But she says that despite the “lack of a full picture in the national data sets”, there is enough evidence in local police data in three police force areas examined “which show disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination”
- Baroness Casey makes 12 recommendations, among them are changing the law “so that an adult having penetrative sex with a child under 16 is rape, no excuses, no defence”
- The report also recommends a national police operation and national inquiry, and reviewing the criminal convictions of victims of child sexual exploitation and quashing any convictions where the government finds victims were criminalised instead of protected