Baroness Louise Casey’s report into group-based sexual exploitation pulls no punches in its description of the failures at all levels to tackle what it calls one of the most horrendous crimes in our society.
Now the question many will be asking is will her report bring about meaningful change?
Certainly, for survivors of abuse, who have often had to fight hard to get their voices heard, practical, on-the-ground change will be vital.
The government accepted all Baroness Casey’s recommendations, but the grooming gangs report itself made the point that many of the problems highlighted have been known about for years – yet there was a failure to act over decades.
The report said too often the children being abused were blamed, not helped.
“If we’d got this right years ago – seeing these girls as children raped rather than ‘wayward teenagers’ or collaborators in their abuse, collecting ethnicity data, and acknowledging as a system that we did not do a good enough job – then I doubt we’d be in this place now,” Baroness Casey said in her foreword to the report.
In fact, if you were to read many past reports, including Baroness Casey’s own 2015 investigation into the failure to tackle grooming gangs by Rotherham Council, you would find many of the same issues being raised.
For instance, ten years ago she recommended tighter checks on Rotherham taxis because of their use by grooming gangs. In Monday’s audit she called for legal loopholes to be closed nationally so cab drivers can’t simply move to another area to get a licence.
Overall, she described the lack of action by the authorities over the years as “denial” or a collective “blindness”, particularly when it comes to the ethnicity of perpetrators.
The government has accepted her call for better data collection on the ethnicity of grooming gang suspects and has promised research into what that tells us about the factors driving exploitation.
Without reliable information, Baroness Casey argues there is a vacuum which different sides can use to “suit the ends of those presenting it.”
The national inquiry will be watched closely to again see if its recommendations are put into practice.
As one experienced lawyer put it, this can’t be another exercise in simply gathering evidence and producing recommendations that are quietly shelved.
