LONDON — Some U.K. authorities failed to collect “proper” ethnicity data about the perpetrators of organized child abuse and feared they would appear racist, the country’s interior minister said Monday.
Yvette Cooper was speaking in the House of Commons following what she called a “damning” report into child grooming gangs responsible for the exploitation of thousands of children across the country.
The review was carried out by Whitehall troubleshooter Louise Casey, a member of the House of Lords — and comes after months of pressure on the British government over the issue from the political right, including Elon Musk.
Cooper promised that collecting ethnicity and nationality data in child sex abuse cases would now become a formal requirement, and rape laws tightened, following the report.
“Questions about ethnicity have been asked but dodged for years,” the Casey report said. “Child sexual exploitation is horrendous whoever commits it, but there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination.”
Casey did, however, insist the data was “not sufficient” to draw conclusions at a “national level.”
National probe
Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Sunday announced a full national inquiry into the scandal, which saw grooming gangs target vulnerable young women in northern England. It will have the power to legally compel witnesses to attend hearings.
Starmer had previously resisted calls for a full inquiry from political opponents in the Conservative Party, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Elon Musk, owner of the X platform, who at the time was a key ally of Donald Trump, spent days in January attacking Starmer over his handling of the abuse scandal. At one point he accused the British prime minister of being “complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN,” and even called for him to be jailed.
At the time Starmer hit out at political opponents, and took aim at the Conservatives who he said had “sat in government for many years” and were now “calling for inquiries because they want to jump on a bandwagon of the far right.”
On Monday, Cooper issued an “unequivocal” apology to victims for their “unimaginable pain and suffering,” and for the “failure of our country’s institutions through decades to prevent that harm and keep you safe.”
The findings had “identified a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children, a continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation and serious violence and from the scars that last a lifetime,” she added.
Accepting a raft of recommendations from Casey, Cooper said: “We have lost more than a decade. That must end now.”
Asylum-seekers pursued
Immigration enforcement would also “immediately pursue” suspects of abuse who are asylum-seekers, Cooper said.
In a potentially incendiary passage of her report, Casey said a significant proportion of live police operations into grooming gangs, which could not be included in the report for fear of prejudicing future court proceedings , appeared to “involve suspects who are non-UK nationals and/or who are claiming asylum in the UK.”
In the Commons, Cooper said “those who groom children or who commit sexual offenses will not be granted asylum in the U.K.,” citing planned changes in the law to exclude anyone convicted of a sexual offense from being given refugee status.
Speaking in the House of Commons on Monday, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the ruling Labour Party had changed its position only after “months of pressure,” including from her own team.
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