The Casey Audit
Institutional failure and political collusion in the UK rape gang scandal
Today’s publication of an 197 page audit by Louise Casey may, hopefully, mark a turning point in the long-running saga of attempts by successive UK governments to cover up the scandal of the lack of justice for children exploited by rape gangs.
7 months ago, in November 2024, I started writing about the Rotherham child rape gang scandal. At the time I had no idea that child sexual exploitation by gangs of men, which had been headline news a decade ago, would become headline news again. Interest in what had gone on, and what was still going on, in more than 50 different British towns, seemed to have evaporated.
That same week, GB News reporter Charlie Peters wrote in The Critic about the sentencing of seven members of a Rotherham rape gang in September 2024. One of the survivors had decided to give her victim impact statement in person. She described how she had been targeted at the age of 11 in her primary school playground, how she was first raped at age 13, and that she had been abused by over 150 men by the time she was 16. “You started to pass me around as if I was a fresh piece of meat, man to man, city to city”, she told one of her rapists. Peters was shocked to find that he was the only reporter in Sheffield Crown Court to witness that testimony and record the verdicts. The rest of the media, it seemed, had lost all interest.
Musk’s intervention
The re-awakening came in January 2025, when Elon Musk reacted on X to news that Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips had rejected a request by Oldham Council for a Home Office led inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the town. Phillips had suggested instead that the council set up its own inquiry. Musk responded that she was a “rape genocide apologist” who “deserves to be in prison”.
If these had been the rantings of a nobody, they would have been ignored. But they came from the world’s richest man and owner of X, who was at the time a close associate of the then President-Elect Trump. This ensured that group-based child sexual exploitation in Britain, and institutional failure to deal with it, became headline news again. Few of the headlines focused on the perpetrators or the survivors, though. Instead, squabbles between political parties dominated the discussion. Conservatives attacked Labour for not addressing the issue, and Labour attacked the Conservatives for not having addressed the issue in the 14 years they were in power. Reform attacked both Labour and the Conservatives for having encouraged immigration.
Survivors noted that politicians who had ignored them for years seemed to listen when a rich powerful man weighed in, but they were relieved that the issue was at last being addressed, however tangentially. Some survivors used Musk’s intervention as an opportunity to call for a statutory National Inquiry. This, they hoped, would reveal the extent of the abuse, hold to account those in authority who had let them down, and put more perpetrators behind bars.
Musk’s intervention did spur the UK Government into some sort of response. It promised to establish a single data set that would eventually reveal a fuller picture of the scale and extent of the exploitation. It would introduce mandatory reporting, so adults in positions of authority could no longer turn a blind eye to crimes committed against children. And it would make grooming an aggravating factor in the sentencing of child sex offenders.
The Government rejected, however, the growing demand for an independent national inquiry, on the grounds that there had already been a national inquiry - the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), completed in 2022. As anyone who had read the 2 million word Inquiry Report would have noticed, the specific features of group-based child sexual exploitation (not just grooming and abuse, but gang rape, torture, imprisonment, and trafficking as well) were hardly mentioned, let alone addressed, by IICSA. Maybe the Government thought that acknowledging the IICSA report would make the issue go away. The Prime Minister, though, seemed determined to pour more fuel on the fire by denigrating survivors - Starmer dismissed their demands for a national inquiry, and claimed they were only “wanting to jump on a bandwagon of the far right”.
Political differences were not confined to parliament. Much of the public response to the renewed media interest in child sexual exploitation reflected political attitudes that, at best, focussed on only a small apart of the problem. On the right, attention focused almost exclusively on cases where ethnic differences were significant (Pakistani heritage perpetrators / white victims). On the left, the focus went instead on social class differences (middle class perpetrators / working class victims), and the victims were often labelled as child prostitutes. Some of the most dismissive reactions came from the liberal centre, which all too often echoed the victim blaming at the heart of institutional failure to protect children. Victims’ experiences were dismissed as a result of their ‘life style choices’, and perpetrators from ethnic minorities were excused in the interests of ‘community cohesion’. What most people seemed unwilling to address was the one element common to almost all child sexual abuse, whatever the ethnicity, religion, or social class - the difference in sex and age between the much older and overwhelmingly male perpetrators and the young overwhelmingly female victims.
Opposition to the Government’s stance was sufficiently intense for it, within a couple of weeks, to change its mind. It still rejected calls for a national inquiry, but it finally admitted that IICSA had not adequately addressed the specific issue of child sexual exploitation. It proposed “victim centred, locally led inquiries”, in Oldham and in up to four other local areas. This was progress of a sort, but these local inquiries would not have the power to compel witnesses to give evidence under oath, and would be unable to investigate the national trafficking networks that are so central to how the rape gangs operate. Local authorities would have to request an inquiry for one to be set up. This would further limit the effectiveness, as authorities in cities like Bradford, where child sexual exploitation is particularly rife, wouldn’t seek an inquiry as they wouldn’t want light to be thrown on their collusion with the rape gangs.
The government also announced “a rapid audit of the current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country”, to be led by Baroness Louise Casey, who had, back in 2015, written an Inspection Report that was highly critical of Rotherham Councl’s failures in relation to child sexual exploitation. It is this ‘rapid audit’ that was published today.
Casey’s audit
The government may have imagined that publication of Louise Casey’s audit would see off demands for a national inquiry into rape gangs. If so, it will have been disappointed. One of Casey’s key recommendations is that a full statutory inquiry is needed. Having read the audit In advance of publication, Starmer accepted that such an inquiry should now take place, and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a new National Crime Agency operation to track down more perpetrators (though without any mention of the extra resources that would be needed if this was to be effective).
Casey has listened to survivors, and it shows. She includes, at the end of the Executive Summary, a personal statement thanking a group of them for meeting her. “I believe them,” she writes. “And one thing is abundantly clear, we as a society owe these women a debt. They should never have been allowed to have suffered the appalling abuse and violence they went through as children. This is especially so for those who were in the ‘care’ of local authorities, where the duty to protect them was left in the hands of professionals on the state’s behalf.”
The audit’s foreword notes that the official term ’group-based child sexual exploitation’ is “a sanitised version of what it is”:
“We are talking about multiple sexual assaults committed 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. When those same girls get older, they face long-term physical and mental health impacts. Sometimes they have criminal convictions for actions they took while under coercion. They have to live with fear and the constant shadow over them of an injustice which has never been righted - the shame of not being believed. And, with a criminal justice system that can re-traumatise them all over again, often over many years.”
The audit is clear that although the grooming process now often starts online, the basic pattern of a man targeting a vulnerable child, grooming her into thinking he is her ‘boyfriend’, and then passing her onto other men for sexual exploitation, has continued. Even though the legal age of consent is 16, the audit found that criminal cases involving 13-15 year old girls were often dropped where the victim had been made to believe the perpetrator was her ‘boyfriend’. The audit recommends a law change to end this, so that “adult men who groom and have sex with 13-15 year olds receive mandatory charges of rape.”
A major problem that the audit identifies, which reflects the ongoing failure to address the rape gang issue, is the absence of relevant data. The audit was unable to assess the scale of the problem, for example, as group-based child sexual exploitation “is not captured clearly in any official data set.” New but still incomplete police data recorded 719 offences in 2023, but “it is highly unlikely that this accurately reflects the true scale … It is a failure of public policy over the years that there remains such limited reliable data.”
One of the key questions the audit was supposed to address was the ethnicity of the perpetrators. The audit doesn’t add much to our existing knowledge, because, it notes, ethnicity is only recorded for a third of perpetrators, “so we are unable to obtain any assessment from the nationally collected data”. The evidence it was able to access, from three police forces, “show disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation.” This contrasts with men acting alone to sexually abuse children, who are predominantly white British.
’Asian’ is of course a very broad category - whether or not the perpetrators are, as commonly believed, predominantly of Pakistani heritage would not have been identifiable from the available data. “Report after report criticises the lack of ethnicity data and calls for better data collection and research into ethnicity and cultural issues that might improve our understanding of offending and increase our chances of tackling it. That remains a gap.”
“Many inquiries and reports have been saying more needs to be done to examine the ethnicity issues associated with group-based child sexual exploitation. 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. Far more importantly, it is continuing to let down the victims and survivors of such abuse, many of whom have already been failed multiple times by the people who are there to protect them.”
The audit identifies a reluctance to acknowledge the ethnicity of perpetrators, for fear of appearing racist. It stresses that “It is not racist to want to examine the ethnicity of offenders. The examination of ethnicity in crime (for offenders and victims) should be about seeing how offending can be better understood and tackled.” The audit suggests that fear of addressing ethnic and cultural differences, together with what it calls ‘adultification’ (assuming children have more autonomy and agency than they do) are the main sources of widespread institutional failure to tackle the rape gangs. Fear of appearing racist may be present, but it may reflect a deeper fear that is only hinted at in the audit - fear of harming community relations, and in some cases fears that local politicians will lose votes if they don’t collude with community leaders who are related to perpetrators.
The Casey audit concludes with twelve recommendations. The main recommendation is the setting up of a National Crime Agency led effort to prosecute more perpetrators, alongside an independent national inquiry, with full statutory powers to compel witnesses. The national inquiry would oversee targeted local inquiries. particularly where it identifies failures or obstruction by statutory services. Crucially, if implemented rigorously, this will ensure that local authorities and police forces which have colluded with rape gangs will be unable to avoid investigation.
The UK Government, responding to Casey’s audit, has said it will follow all 12 of its recommendations. It will be difficult for survivors to believe that a Government that dismissed their demands as ‘far right’ four months ago is now committed to effective action. Much will depend on who will be appointed to chair the Inquiry, how prepared they are to listen to survivors, and how willing they will be to tackle the corrupt links - between politicians, police superintendents, senior council officials, and relatives of perpetrators who are community leaders - that underly the failure to protect children in so many localities..
How time-limited the Inquiry will be, and how deep it will go, will depend crucially on how much we keep up the pressure.
More on the background
The background is covered more fully in my earlier posts on group-based child sexual exploitation:
The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal - Part 1 (10 Nov 2024)
The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal - Part 2 (12 Nov 2024)
Trigger Warning (4 Jan 2025)
No end of a cover up? (9 Jan 2025)
Rape gangs U-turn (16 Jan 2025)
In memory of Andrew Norfolk 1965-2025, the Times journalist who did so much to bring information about the rape gangs, particularly in Rotherham, to public attention.