LONDON: A rapid national audit of grooming gangs ordered by UK PM Keir Starmer in February 2025, following pressure from Elon Musk and published late Monday, has found that UK police and councils deliberately concealed the Asian ethnicity of the perpetrators to avoid “appearing racist” and to avoid “raising community tensions”.In two-thirds of cases of “group-based child sexual exploitation”, no ethnicity was even collected. The audit by Baroness Casey found that a 2020 home office report claiming the majority of predators were white had used flawed data.Casey found that after examining data held by three police forces that did have ethnicity collected, the men of “Asian ethnicity” were “over-represented” as perpetrators of grooming gangs, which warranted further examination.“More often than not, the official reports do not discuss the perpetrators, let alone their ethnicity or any cultural drivers. There is a palpable discomfort in any discussion of ethnicity in most of them. Where ethnicity is mentioned, it is referred to in euphemisms such as ‘the local community’, or it is buried deep in the report,” she wrote.“It is not racist to want to examine the ethnicity of offenders,” she said and, in her report, called for it to be made mandatory for the police to record the ethnicity and nationality of all suspects in grooming gang cases.It was not just white vulnerable girls who are victims, she found. “This audit received representations about the need to examine further cultural and religious drivers behind child sexual exploitation, including concerns that Sikh and Hindu children had been targeted for abuse because they were ‘easy targets’ and who would never tell anyone about being exploited because of the shame,” Casey wrote.She also recommended for the National Crime Agency to take over investigations, for a national inquiry to be ordered, for adults who have penetrative sex with a child under 16 to always be charged with rape, and for govt to commission research into the drivers and cultural factors.In Jan Labour MPs had voted against a national inquiry into grooming gangs and Starmer had described those calling for inquiries as “jumping on a bandwagon of the far-right”.The audit sparked UK Keir Stammer to make a spectacular U-turn and announce a national inquiry at the weekend ahead of the report’s publication. He has agreed to implement all 12 recommendations.The report also found that in current live cases a “significant number” of men running grooming gangs are non-UK nationals and asylum seekers.Home secretary Yvette Cooper announced that henceforth “anyone convicted of sexual offences be excluded from the asylum system and denied refugee status”.
