A previous Home Office paper falsely claimed that white men were largely responsible for group-based child sex abuse.
The United Kingdom’s rapid audit on child sexual exploitation by so-called “grooming gangs” found that ethnicity is not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators nationally, but several local data sets show significant overrepresentation of South Asian men. Additionally, the Casey Report found that authorities and organizations overlooked or deliberately ignored ethnic trends due to a “fear of appearing racist.”
“Flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue,” reads the rapid audit, dubbed the “Casey Report” after its leader Baroness Louise Casey. “Asian” in the England and Wales census encompasses “Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, [and] any other Asian background.”
Although previous government reviews — like Home Office 2020 paper titled “Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation Characteristics of Offending” — claimed that white men are a majority of the offenders, the Casey Report states in its introduction that “the system claims there is an overwhelming problem with White perpetrators when that can’t be proved.” The Casey Report notes that, if drawing from the national data and including the instances where the perpetrator’s ethnicity is either unknown or not declared, then just 28 percent of perpetrators are white.
“Media reporting at the time the Home Office paper was published included headlines that ‘most child sexual abuse gangs made up of white men’ and the report continues to be referred to in the media as proof that the claim has been ‘debunked,’” states the report, which was commissioned by the government in February of this year. “This audit found it hard to understand how the Home Office paper reached that conclusion, which does not seem to be evidenced in research or data.”
In the evaluation of 50 local reviews regarding child sexual exploitation involving multiple offenders, the ethnicities of perpetrators could be identified in only 15 localities, and ten of those involved perpetrators of predominantly Asian or Pakistani ethnicity. In Rotherham, Operation Stovewood found that nearly two-thirds of suspects — 64 percent — were recorded as having a Pakistani background, even though Pakistanis make up just about 4 percent of the town’s population. By contrast, just 22 percent of suspects are recorded as British. Of the convictions, 62 percent were recorded as having a Pakistani background.
On the very same page of the Casey Report that says Pakistanis account for two-thirds of convictions in Operation Stovewood, the researchers write, “We cannot and should not draw any conclusions from individual nationalities or cultures alone.”
“Many inquiries and reports have been saying more needs to be done to examine the ethnicity issues associated with group-based child sexual exploitation,” reads the Casey Report, released on Monday. “It plays into the hands of groups with divisive political agendas not to examine or deal with these issues conclusively. This does everyone a disservice, including Asian and Pakistani communities.”
The Casey Report acknowledges that other audits avoid discussing trends in the perpetrators’ ethnicity and “any cultural drivers.” Ethnicity is often discussed in “euphemisms” such as “the local community,” the report states. As was found in previous reviews, like the Jay Report published in 2014, the Casey Report found that local authorities avoided publicizing the race or ethnicity of perpetrators to prevent the accusation of racism or inflaming interracial tension.
“We heard from police forces that local authorities would discourage them from publicising the successful conviction of perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation due to fears of raising tensions,” reads the Casey Report. “Instead of examining whether there is disproportionality in ethnicity or cultural factors at play in certain types of offending, we found many examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems.”
The Rotherham council sought an injunction to prevent journalist Andrew Norfolk with The Times from publishing stories about the town’s grooming gangs on the grounds that such articles would endanger the victims. In response to one of his articles published in 2012 about a victim of child sexual abuse, Norfolk said, “We’d thought that Rotherham Council and South Yorkshire Police would have to respond by saying, ‘this is appalling, we will take action’ . . . . Instead, what they did was ask South Yorkshire Police to launch a criminal inquiry into who had leaked the material to me.”
The Casey Report states that roughly 500,000 U.K. children a year likely experience child sexual abuse of some kind, although a vast majority is undocumented; the police record roughly 100,000 instances of child sexual abuse and exploitation annually. The report notes that the growth of the internet and development of social media has changed how the perpetrators recruit and communicate with their victims. Additionally, technology has spurred a significant increase in the production, possession, and dissemination of images depicting child sexual abuse: There were 41,033 indecent-images-of-children offenses in 2024, an 863 percent increase from a decade prior.
However, the Casey Report is specifically dedicated to analyzing group-based sexual abuse of children.
“That term ‘group-based child sexual exploitation’ is actually a sanitised version of what it is,” opens the report, published on Monday. “I want to set it out in unsanitised terms: we are talking about multiple sexual assaults committed against children by multiple men on multiple occasions; beatings and gang rapes. Girls having to have abortions, contracting sexually transmitted infections, having children removed from them at birth.”
National police data on grooming gangs shows that, in 2023, 78 percent of victims were girls and 57 percent of victims were aged ten through 15. The age of consent is 16, but the report states that its researchers found “too many examples” where criminal cases were dropped, or the charge of rape was downgraded on the grounds that a 13-15-year-old claimed to be “in love with” with the perpetrator or supposedly “consented” to sex.
“This audit heard that prosecution for rape of a 13–15-year-old was less likely to succeed for a number of reasons, including how children of this age are more likely to be viewed as adults who are capable of giving consent,” states the Casey Report. For instance, the report mentions a 2024 child sexual exploitation case that had multiple suspects connected to a 13-year-old girl; the judge in this case remarked that the girl “appeared older than 13” and described her as exhibiting “promiscuous behaviour.”
One case mentioned in the report is that of a trafficked 16-year-old child who was advertised on an adult sex work website and visited by at least 25 men over four days.
According to the report, common traits among the victims include having a learning or physical disability, not perceiving the relationship with the groomer as abusive, being encouraged to recruit other children, fearing repercussions for speaking to authorities or their families, and going missing for hours or days. As is the case with the perpetrators, the ethnic data on the victims is underreported. If the data for the victims includes those whose ethnicity is known, states the report, then the victims known to be white constitute 39 percent of all victims.
Evidence submitted to the Casey Report about victims included descriptions of a “no questions asked” culture at health clinics where under-age abortions were performed and minors repeatedly visiting for the “morning after” pill.
One chapter of the Casey Report is dedicated to the taxi industry, which has provided an avenue for perpetrators to meet victims and transport them to different locations. Although some localities have stringent rules for licensing taxi drivers, the Casey Report notes, a driver may operate outside of where the license is obtained, thus creating a “loophole” for perpetrators to obtain certification in a more “lax” borough and operate elsewhere.
The authors of the Casey Report had difficulty obtaining information, stating, “We also sought data from the Department for Health & Social Care and the Government of Wales on how many cases of child sexual abuse or exploitation they see in health services but have only been able to obtain data from Sexual Assault Referral Centres (England).” Citing this portion of the document, Reform politician Nigel Farage posed the following question: “Has the cover up already begun? This deserves answers.”
The report sets forth recommendations, including amending the law such that penetration of a child under age 16 is automatically rape, launching a national inquiry, mandating the collection of ethnicity and nationality for all suspects involved in child sexual abuse, improving regulations for the taxi industry, and commissioning research on “cultural factors” behind the grooming gangs.
“More effort is required to identify the nature of group-based child sexual exploitation and why it appears men of Asian and Pakistani ethnicity are disproportionately represented in some areas, in order to understand it better, and to tackle it more effectively,” reads the Casey Report.
In January, Prime Minister Keir Starmer accused politicians of “spreading lies and misinformation” about the grooming gangs, as well as “jumping on a bandwagon” and “amplifying what the far-right is saying” to gain attention.