The ethnicity and nationality of all suspects in child sexual abuse and exploitation cases in Britain will be recorded by the police under new mandatory reporting rules, the British home secretary told Parliament on Monday.
The requirement was one of the recommendations of a government-commissioned review into a decades-long scandal in Britain involving so-called grooming gangs. The term refers to the sexual exploitation of young girls by groups of men in several towns and cities, which first came to widespread public attention in the early 2010s.
Most of the perpetrators in the largest criminal prosecutions so far have been of Pakistani heritage. The author of the review, Louise Casey, a member of the House of Lords who has conducted several inquiries into institutional failings, said that instead of investigating the ethnicity issue, many organizations had avoided the topic “for fear of appearing racist” or raising community tensions.
She added that while “a lot of attention” had been given to the issue of grooming gangs and “reviews, inquiries and reports have made recommendations,” they had not been acted on forcefully enough, and victims had been repeatedly failed.
Ms. Casey’s review made 12 recommendations, which she said would allow the country “to draw a line in the sand” and “make sure we do not end up back here again in a few years’ time.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the government would carry out all the proposals, including changing the law to ensure that any adult who engaged in penetrative sex with a child under 16 would be charged with rape, even if the child was perceived to have been “in love with” the perpetrator, and establishing the “formal requirement” for the police to collect ethnicity and nationality data.
Men of Asian and Pakistani ethnicity were “disproportionately represented” among grooming gangs in three areas examined in her review, Ms. Casey said. But she added that the data was “not sufficient to allow any conclusions to be drawn at the national level.”
“The ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators,” she wrote. This created an information “vacuum” that let people with “malicious intent sow and spread hatred,” she said, while “victims are left forgotten, a sideshow as data is used to suit each side’s own ends.”
Holly Archer, who was among the child victims of a grooming gang that operated in the Midlands town of Telford, England, in the 2000s, criticized what she called political “point scoring” and called for lawmakers to leave their differences “at the wayside” and work together.
“Victims have been left behind every time when child sexual exploitation hits the headlines; it’s draining emotionally,” she told The New York Times. “I hope this is the beginning of the end of this tug of war with vulnerable women.”
On Saturday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that the government would agree to Ms. Casey’s call for a full national inquiry — a years-old issue brought back to public attention by the tech billionaire Elon Musk in vitriolic social media posts in January.
The Labour government previously resisted such an inquiry, saying it was focused on carrying out recommendations from a previous seven-year inquiry into child sexual abuse, which ended in 2022. Ms. Cooper said the new inquiry could take three years.
Ms. Casey’s report described a form of abuse known as the “boyfriend model,” in which men target often-vulnerable children, such as those in foster care institutions or with learning disabilities, and groom them into believing they are in a loving relationship.
The victim is then passed to other men for sex, using drugs and alcohol to make them compliant, and often controlled using violence.
Sarah Champion, the member of Parliament for Rotherham, a Yorkshire town where a previous review found that at least 1,400 children had been sexually abused between 1997 and 2013, said in an interview on Monday that victims had been “ignored, belittled and even criminalized” after coming forward.
“A national inquiry is worth nothing without the resources and commitment to make change happen,” Ms. Champion added. “In cases of potential cover-ups by those in authority, we need to know that those responsible are weeded out and held to account.”
Lawyers who specialize in sexual offenses say the failure to tackle grooming gangs is linked to systemic issues in Britain’s justice system, where the vast majority of reported sexual offenses are never prosecuted. In the year that ended in March 2024, only 4 percent of rapes recorded by the police in England and Wales resulted in a charge against a suspect.
Kate Ellis, from the Center for Women’s Justice charity, said in an interview that to charge someone with a crime, the Crown Prosecution Service, or C.P.S., must decide that there is a “realistic prospect of conviction” — a threshold it may not believe is met if victims are recalling events from many years ago, or if their memories are affected by trauma, alcohol or drugs.
“The precise factors which cause these children to be vulnerable to sexual exploitation,” Ms. Ellis said, “are the very same factors the police and C.P.S. take into account when they reach the conclusion that there is no realistic prospect of conviction.”
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