New Delhi: For several years, the grooming gangs scandal has been at the centre of public and political debate in the UK. And now, a new report by Baroness Louise Casey has made damning revelations—one that has brought the spotlight back on the British-Pakistani community, and exposed institutional failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, exploitation, and serious violence.
While the perpetrators in several high-profile past grooming cases were from the Pakistani ethnic community, the scale of their involvement has often been a matter of debate. The latest report now calls out authorities for having “shied away from” recording the ethnicity of the perpetrators—who were often men of Pakistani origin or, as the report says, Asian heritage.
Grooming involves perpetrators coercing, manipulating and deceiving children into sex and creating an illusion of consent. Several reports have found that the victims in such cases often belong to vulnerable backgrounds—they might be in care, have a physical or mental disability, and have already suffered neglect or abuse in earlier years.
The latest report explains the grooming gang model involves a man grooming a vulnerable adolescent child into thinking they are their ‘boyfriend’, and showering them with love and gifts. With a soup of drugs, alcohol, violence and coercion used to control these children, the men then pass them to other men for sex.
The report, ‘National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse’, was published 16 June. It took around four months preparing, and is the first report looking exclusively at grooming gangs at the national level.
In a personal note attached to the report, Baroness Casey wrote that while she cannot verify every single thing the women told her, “but I believe them, and one thing is abundantly clear—we as a society owe these women a debt”.
The UK government has agreed to accept all the 12 recommendations of the Casey report, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer has also announced a national inquiry into grooming gangs and institutional failures that enabled this abuse.
On the lack of ethnicity data on the perpetrators, the report asserts, “Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young White girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.”
“Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue.”
The UK government has now announced that it will make it a requirement for the police to collect ethnicity and nationality data in every case of child sexual exploitation and abuse, including group-based child sexual exploitation, or what is colloquially called, grooming gangs.
The rot
While the allegations of young girls being groomed by gangs of men had been circulating in the UK for several years, the year 2010 saw several men being convicted in Derbyshire and Rotherham for systematically grooming and sexually abusing teenage girls.
These cases were especially sensitive considering the fact that the perpetrators in several instances were found to be of the British-Pakistani ethnicity, and what the report now calls, Asian ethnic background.
We will leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of truth for victims and survivors of grooming gangs.
Today, Home Secretary @YvetteCooperMP accepted all of Baroness Casey’s recommendations to deliver justice for them. pic.twitter.com/lqFjKvqd0U
— Home Office (@ukhomeoffice) June 16, 2025
Then, in January 2011, The Times of London published a series of investigative reports that rattled the British public and the political establishment.
In 2014, Professor Alexis Jay’s Independent Inquiry into the Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham 1997– 2013 raised alarms and made international headlines. The report found that at least 1,400 children had been abused between 1997 and 2013, predominantly by men of Pakistani ethnicity.
This report said that while a majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’ by victims, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. It added several staff members described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; while others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.
There have been several similar cases and reports over the years, highlighting such concerns over grooming gangs operating in other parts of England.
The Musk effect
Several people are, however, crediting American billionaire Elon Musk for the Casey report.
In early January, Musk brought renewed attention to the grooming gangs in the UK, through targeted posts on his social media platform ‘X’, attacking PM Starmer and other members of the Labour government.
In one such post, he claimed Starmer was deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes. In another post, he called Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist”, after he saw reports that she had rejected calls for public inquiry into grooming allegations in Oldham. Phillips had instead advocated it should be up to local councils to commission new inquiries.
Meanwhile, PM Starmer was resisting calls to set up a national inquiry into grooming gangs, even suggesting that some demands for an inquiry were politically motivated, accusing Conservative MPs and others of “jumping on the bandwagon of the far right”.
On 8 January, a Conservative bid for a national inquiry into grooming gangs was rejected by all Labour MPs in the House by a vote of 364 against 111.
However, a few British politicians have now credited Musk for exerting renewed pressure on the Labour government, which then commissioned Baroness Casey in mid-January to conduct a rapid review into group-based child sexual exploitation.
At the outset, the report says that while the term ‘group-based child sexual exploitation’ is actually a sanitised version of what it is, she wants 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. When those same girls get older, they face long-term physical and mental health impacts.”
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‘Not racist’
Several inquiries into grooming gangs and child sexual abuse have criticised the lack of ethnicity data in such cases. However, critics have also cautioned that the ethnicity narrative is often a deadly soup of sensationalism, racial stereotyping, and political agendas, and that such allegations end up stigmatising entire Asian communities.
The blanket usage of the term ‘Asian grooming gangs’ has also faced condemnation by British Indians, Sikhs, and East Asian communities in the UK.
Even Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi highlighted this on ‘X.’ “Repeat after me, they aren’t ASIAN Grooming Gangs but PAKISTANI grooming gangs. Why should Asians take the fall for one absolute rogue nation?” she wrote. Musk responded to this with a tweet, saying “true”.
The Casey report now says that the ethnicity of people involved in grooming gangs had been “shied away from” by authorities, with ethnicity data not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators. It describes this data gap as “appalling” and a “major failing”.
The report says that the issue of ethnicity of the perpetrators was a key question for this audit. But it said that since authorities shied away from recording ethnicity data, they were unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data.
But it says that despite the lack of a full picture in the national data sets, there is enough evidence available in local police data in three police force areas which it examined.
According to the report, these data sets 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”.
“It is not racist to want to examine the ethnicity of offenders,” it declares, asserting the examination of ethnicity in crime (for offenders and victims) should be about seeing how the offence can be better understood and tackled.
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The recommendations
The 197-page report then sets out 12 very clear recommendations.
The first of these says that the law in England and Wales should be changed so adults who intentionally penetrate the vagina, anus or mouth of a child under 16 receive mandatory charges of rape.
This is because the age of consent in the UK is 16, but despite this, the report finds there were too many criminal cases that were dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges saying that a 13-to 15-year-old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.
This is attributed to a ‘grey area’ in the law where, although any sexual activity with 13–to 15-year-olds is unlawful, the decision on whether to charge, and which offence to charge with, is left open to interpretation.
But now, the report has suggested that adult men who groom and have sex with 13–15-year-olds received mandatory charges of rape, mirroring the approach taken in countries like France.
Among other things, it asserts that the government should make it mandatory to collect ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases and work with the police to improve the collection of ethnicity data for victims.
Another suggestion says that 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 licensing and regulation of taxi drivers.
This was because the audit noted that several group-based offenders were employed in the nighttime economy, and taxis are a part of the night time economy. It also found that girls were frequently moved around in cars and taxis, facilitated by poor taxi licensing arrangements.
Also Read: Elon Musk has seized on UK grooming gangs issue for his own cause, not for rape victims
What next
Critics have pointed out that several recommendations from previous inquiries have not been implemented. However, the UK government has been prompt in acting on Baroness Casey’s report.
In her statement to Parliament, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper also tendered an apology to the victims. She said, “To the victims and survivors of sexual exploitation and grooming gangs, on behalf of this and past governments and the many public authorities who let you down, I want to reiterate an unequivocal apology for the unimaginable pain and suffering you have suffered and the failure of our country’s institutions through decades to prevent that harm and keep you safe. But words are not enough. Victims and survivors need action.”
The government’s response to the national audit says it will accept all 12 recommendations of the report, alongside announcing a national inquiry to coordinate a series of targeted local investigations “with the aim of holding institutions to account for current and historic failures in their response to group-based CSE (child sexual exploitation)”.
What all of this collectively mean is that even past cases that had been dropped will be relooked into. This was a suggestion of the Casey report as well. It had demanded a national criminal investigation and a national inquiry.
In fact, the report had said that every local police force in England and Wales should review records to identify cases of child sexual exploitation that have not been acted on through.
Cooper also told the House of Commons that more than 800 grooming-gangs related cold cases had already been identified for a formal review, and that this number was expected to rise to more than 1,000 in the coming weeks.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)
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Paki men just want to be worshipped (e.g. the مجازی خدا or God-in-the-world culture), which is kinda stupid and illogical given that Tawhid or oneness of God is so central to the faith.
But illogical sums it up perfectly. They think they’re superior because they’ve been brought up believing they are (heck even the women are brought up believing they’re inferior to men, but that’s another topic).
Political correctness sets admirable goals, hoping that we don’t stigmatise. Sadly, it often goes not one but many bridges too far and ends up becoming an impediment to addressing the real issues that plague us – in short, no better than the disease it purports to hold the cure to.
Muslim Pakistani not one was non Muslim and nearly all Pakistani
Ethnic and religious statistics are available in the UK. Muslims make up 7% of the population of England and Wales, 18% of prison inmates
In comparison, Hindus and Sikhs make up 2% and 0.9% of the general population but 0% and 1% of prison inmates respectively
Blacks make up 4% of the population but 12% of prison inmates
Pakistani men are an abomination. An affront to humanity itself.
The intense hatred they carry in their minds for people of other communities and ethnicities is beyond comprehension. Even Hitler’s Nazis would shudder to engage in practices that Pakistani society has been engaging in over the last seven decades.
When the school curriculum of a nation teaches hatred towards others and engages in disinformation campaigns under the guise of teaching “history” or “Pakistan studies”, this becomes the inevitable result.