Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced details in the Commons of the review by Dame Louise Casey into Britain’s grooming gangs scandal.
She stressed the “damning” findings were a “stain on society” in the UK with appalling cases of abuse in a string of towns including Rochdale, Oldham, Rotherham and Oxford.
The key findings include:
* Children need to be treated as children
* Too many grooming cases have been dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges because 13 to 15-year-olds were perceived to have been “in love with or consented to sex” with the perpetrators
* The law should be changed so adult men who groom and have sex with 13–15-yearolds received mandatory charges of rape
* In three police force areas, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire, where high-profile cases involving Pakistani-heritage men have long been investigated and reported, the suspects of “group based child sexual offences were disproportionately likely to be Asian men”
* “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”.
* In a dozen live, complex, group-based child sexual exploitation police operations, a significant proportion of these cases appear to involve suspects who are non-UK nationals and/or who are claiming asylum in the UK
* Two thirds of overall cases had no ethnicity data recorded. The Government should make mandatory the collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases
* Grooming gang prosecutions and investigations had also been identified where the alleged perpetrators are White British, European, African and Middle Eastern
* There is “continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling” among local agencies on grooming gangs
* Further local investigation are needed but they should be overseen by a national commission with statutory inquiry powers
* A national criminal operation is needed to catch more grooming gang paedophiles, which will be overseen by the National Crime Agency
* With taxi drivers using their vehicles to target vulnerable teenagers, the Department for Transport should take immediate action to put a stop to ‘out of area taxis’ and bring in more rigorous statutory standards for local authority licensing and regulation of taxi drivers.
* Around 500,000 children a year are likely to experience child sexual abuse (of any kind).
* However, for the vast majority, their abuse is not identified, and it is not reported to the police either at the time or later
* Police recorded crime data shows just over 100,000 offences of child sexual abuse and exploitation recorded in 2024, with around 60% of these being contact offences (and the remainder online offences)
* Of these contact offences, an estimated 17,100 are ‘flagged’ by police as child sexual exploitation in police recorded crime data
* The only figure on group-based child sexual exploitation comes from a new police dataset (called the Complex and Organised Child Abuse 7 Dataset - COCAD) which, while suffering a number of limitations, has identified around 700 recorded offences of group-based child sexual exploitation in 2023.
* National police data confirms that the majority of victims of child sexual exploitation are girls (78% in 2023) with the most common age for victims being between 10 and 15 years old (57% in 2023).
* Most perpetrators are men (76% in 2023). The data suggests that the age profile of perpetrators varies, with 39% of suspects aged 10 to 15 and 18% aged 18 to 29. This younger age profile is likely to be resulting from an increase in reporting of online and child-on-child offending
Two men who groomed and raped vulnerable girls in Rotherham were jailed earlier this year.
Romauld Stefan Houphouet, 37, an Ivoirian national of Sheffield, and Absolom Sigiyo, 42, a Zimbabwean national of Rotherham were found guilty of raping two 15-year-old girls countless times between 2011 and 2012.
The victims told investigators they were taken to numerous parties in Rotherham where they were given alcohol and abused by the men, some of whom openly referred to them as “fresh meat”.
Houphouet was sentenced to 20 years in prison and Sigiyo was jailed for 18 years and six months.
