Requirement made as review finds ‘over-representation’ of Asian men among grooming gang suspects
Yvette Cooper has condemned damning failures by the authorities to protect children from grooming gangs as she announced there would be a formal requirement on police for the first time to collect ethnicity and nationality data for all cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation.
The home secretary confirmed the government would accept all 12 recommendations of Louise Casey’s rapid review, including setting up a statutory inquiry into institutional failures, marking a significant reversal after months of pressure on Labour to act.
In her rapid review, Lady Casey found evidence of “over-representation” of Asian and Pakistani heritage men among suspects in local data – collected in Greater Manchester, West and South Yorkshire – and criticised a continued failure to gather robust data at a national level.
She found evidence that some authorities refused to take into account the ethnicity of offenders out of fear of appearing racist, and said “blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good, but misdirected intentions, all played a part in this collective failure”.
