I’m currently ploughing my way through the Casey Report, a review on how Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) in the United Kingdom has been handled. The review was commissioned by Britain’s Labour government at the start of 2025 and this review has now been published. I would strongly counsel any reader of this piece, or any piece on this subject by others, to read the original report by Baroness Louise Casey of Blackstock to get the full flavour of just how completely abandoned some of Britain’s most vulnerable children have been by the state and by the state agencies that were tasked with protecting them. Reading the report will give you a much fuller picture of the appalling situation Britain is in than I could by my comments on the report. You can find the link to the report via the link below:
Reading this review I can understand why the Government has done a U-turn on the idea of a national inquiry into CSE, despite very clearly standing against the idea. This is because this report has turned out to a large extent how I expected it to be. What’s in this report is so bad, so awful and shows up so many institutional failures, that I doubt any government anywhere in the free world that didn’t want a political revolution on its hands could have suppressed it or failed to act on its recommendations. The question of how the government could ultimately react and how the national inquiry into child sexual exploitation is likely to go and what sort of blocking tactics might be employed by the guilty is probably for another article. Just reading through the Casey Report as both a writer and more importantly as a parent, has horrified me so much that I’m going to have to go out for a few beers just to try to blot out what I’ve read.
Every turn of the page that I make when reading this report throws up a new horror to be both angry and disgusted about. Anger and disgust are about the only emotions I can feel when reading of the crimes committed by the exploiters of children and the failure by the institutions that we have been told to trust, to stop these crimes or prevent them from happening.
The victims of exploitation, who were in the majority girls, were failed by everyone from social services, children’s homes, police, elected local representatives, the Home Office and many more. Social workers in areas where there was extensive group-based CSE being carried out by Muslims should have been the last line of defence for those victimised by gangs, but instead these girls were abandoned by social workers, who merely referred to them as ‘child prostitutes’ (1) and did no more. Police forces that should have had as a priority the protection of the vulnerable and the apprehension of criminals did neither, especially when it was a case of vulnerable girls as victims and Pakistani abusers as suspects.
Police forces failed to join the dots regarding these cases and discover the extent of what in some areas is an almost entirely Islamic Rape Gang phenomenon, treated victims who had been coerced into committing crimes by gangs as the real criminals, not those who had abused and coerced them. Police, either by incompetence or by deliberate intent depending on the situation, failed dismally to record the ethnicity and religious affiliation of suspects and accused, despite previous reports stating that better data collection was necessary.
The elected representatives on local authorities and the non-political local government officers have clearly also failed and many Britons have independently of this and other reports pointed out that some of them have seemingly prioritised ‘community relations’ i.e. giving mostly Islamic perpetrators a free pass. This free pass for perpetrators that can reasonably be called beasts in human form was issued and issued covertly for either electoral reasons; the perpetrator community being a reliable source of votes for Labour and to a lesser extent other parties, or for fear that Islamic communities will kick off violently if the issue of rape gangs is robustly investigated and prosecuted.
Baroness Casey’s report also points out that the National Health Service has massively failed abused children, with one example being data failures such as noting a rise in children referred to sexual assault services but big gaps in data as to what had caused that rise. This looks like yet another thing to not applaud the NHS about.
Whilst many of Baroness Casey’s report deals with failures at a local level, such as local NHS units failing to be curious about the rise in sexual assault centre referrals, local police IT systems that are unable to communicate with one another and local authorities that have failed to act on what we see now were obvious problems, she also takes aim at national government and national agencies. The Ministry of Justice for example does not keep sufficient records that Baroness Casey could access about Child Sexual Exploitation. They, of course, keep records of those convicted or who plead guilty to child sexual abuse but it both surprises and shocks me that with roughly a decade and a half of public knowledge about organised child sexual exploitation that this phenomenon is not being properly and consistently recorded. Why is that? Is it the well renowned incompetence of Britain’s Civil Service, a failure to treat this issue with the seriousness it deserves or something more sinister, such as the desire to hide the fact that in some police areas gangs of Muslims have been raping our children with almost complete impunity for decades? I must say that in the light of the numerous previous reports that have been published on all aspects of child sexual exploitation it is astonishing that nobody in the Ministry of Justice thought that this aspect of sexual offending should be recorded. What’s absolutely gobsmacking is even those parts of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) responsible for prosecuting group-based sexual crimes were unable to produce data to Baroness Casey about the numbers of group-based sexual offence cases that they were handling.
The legal process when cases are prosecuted comes in for some examination by Baroness Casey. In many of the group-based sexual abuse trials there are multiple defendants, so many in fact that cases have to be split up into separate trials. That and a shortage of courtrooms and court staff can result in situations such as a case that is sent for trial today having its first proper hearing in 2027. In cases where there are a large number of defendants, a survivor of group-based sexual abuse might be expected to have to give evidence in two or more separate trials, with all the additional trauma and fear of intimidation by either the defendants or associates of the defendants that this trial model brings with it. Baroness Casey also highlighted a worrying issue concerning what charges the CPS are using. The CPS is apparently downgrading cases of rape where the victim is aged between 13 and 15, for fear that the evidence might not meet the evidence standard, the person making the allegation might not be seen by jury as ‘credible’ or the defendant might successfully deploy the defence that he mistook the girl for being older. In these cases Baroness Casey found that cases of this nature were not being sent to the courts to be prosecuted as rape cases but instead as ‘sexual activity with a child’ which are deemed by legislation to be less serious in nature than rape. I concur with those who believe the loophole of downgrading in these sorts of cases needs to be closed. Personally I’d rather see some cases of rape lost in the courts, even if this does cause great public expense, than see defendants who might be convicted of rape end up either pleading guilty to or being convicted of lesser grade offences. Maybe the prosecution authorities are too wary of losses and because of that awareness are putting forward downgraded cases in order that the defendant be convicted of something, even if it is not a headline offence like rape.
It’s clear from reading this report that hundreds of thousands of children have been failed by the state. They’ve been failed by the police, children’s services, local and national government and by Civil Servants. In addition to the failures mentioned above, the victims of sexual abuse and in particular those who have been victimised by Islamic Rape Gangs, have also been let down by media and academia. With regards to the media, it pains me as a former media worker to have to say that the media could have done better with this issue. They only picked up on the Islamic Rape Gang issue very late in the day and it was often only those reporters who had a deep personal revulsion for these Islamic Rape Gangs, such as the late and much lamented Andrew Norfolk who bothered to do the proper journalistic digging that these stories required. Academia must also share blame for the nation’s failure to tackle group-based sexual abuse and in particular the issue of Islamic Rape Gangs. Academia has been part of what I could call a ‘denialist alliance’ that has played down the cultural and religious aspects of group-based sexual activity. Key people in this denialist alliance, as both I and others have seen it, are Dr Ella Cockbain, now of University College London and Waqas Tufail, now of Leeds University. Back in January 2020 Cockbain and Tufail published a paper (linked below via the article (2) ) that dismissed the phenomenon of Islamic Grooming Gangs as a ‘narrative’, thereby implying that the claims made by the public of Islamic Grooming and Rape Gangs were false and they attacked the veracity of the Jay Report into the Rotherham grooming gang scandal, although the Jay report’s figure of 1400 victims of the rape gangs in that town have been subsequently verified. Whilst we should be rightly concerned about the academic denialism from the likes of Cockbain and Tufail, it needs to be stressed that they are probably not the only academics who could be involved in downplaying Britain’s child sexual exploitation problems.
What the Casey report shows us is that we’ve all been let down on the issue of child sexual exploitation. We’ve been let down by police, social services, the NHS, the media and academia, along with local and national government and Britain’s unelected adminisphere. Even the charities that ostensibly operate in order to protect children are alleged to have played their part in downplaying the nature of some aspects of child sexual exploitation.
Read the report, I beg of you. It shows us where everything went wrong. It shows us the dehumanisation of the victims of these gangs by those who should have helped them, along with the wariness that those in authority had with regards to countering cultural and religious drivers for a style of sexual abuse that I find very easy to refer to as an atrocity.
That’s enough writing for me today. Reading the Casey Report has shocked me to the core and at least for the moment I am going to try to forget what I’ve read in it and I’m going to go off and have a drink.
References and links:
(1) Daily Mail story of yet another Islamic Rape Gang that has only just, after many years, been brought to justice
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14771955/Rochdale-grooming-gang-convicted-true-horror.html
(2) Academic denialism, a guest post via Fahrenheit 211 from March 2020
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