UK announces national inquiry into child sexual abuse by Pakistani-origin gangs

London, Jun 16 (PTI) The UK government on Monday announced a national inquiry after an “audit” into historic child sexual exploitation concluded a consistent failure to fully acknowledge or collect accurate data about men of Pakistani heritage “grooming and sexually exploiting young white girls”.

UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper updated Parliament on the findings of the audit she had set up earlier this year, noting that many major investigations into the issue have involved "Pakistani heritage gangs".

Baroness Louise Casey submitted the ‘National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse’, making a series of recommendations including the urgent need for data collection around the ethnicity of perpetrators that has been “shied away from”.

“In the local data that the audit examined from three police forces, they identified clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men, and she refers to examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions,” Cooper told the House of Commons, referencing Casey’s audit findings.

“The vast majority of people in our British, Asian and Pakistani heritage communities continue to be appalled by these terrible crimes and agree that the criminal minority of sick predators and perpetrators in every community must be dealt with robustly by the criminal law,” she said.

It came as Prime Minister Keir Starmer had told reporters over the weekend that he intends to accept all of Casey’s recommendations, including a national inquiry into the scandal.

Besides, Cooper told members of Parliament that rape laws will be tightened up and many girls convicted of child prostitution would be cleared.

“Blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions all played a part in this collective failure,” said the minister, as she reiterated an “unequivocal apology” to the victims of child sexual exploitation.

The issue had been pushed back into the spotlight when Tesla CEO Elon Musk attacked the UK’s handling of the historic scandal on his X platform back in January.

The audit, launched back then, concludes: “Questions about ethnicity have been asked but dodged for years... The system claims there is an overwhelming problem with White perpetrators when that can’t be proved. This does no one any favours at all, and least of all those in the Asian, Pakistani or Muslim communities who needlessly suffer as those with malicious intent use this obfuscation to sow and spread hatred.

“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.” The report also highlights that the term “group-based child sexual exploitation” is a “sanitised version” that covers “multiple sexual assaults committed against children by multiple men on multiple occasions; beatings and gang rapes”.

“Girls having to have abortions, contracting sexually transmitted infections, having children removed from them at birth. When those same girls get older, they face long-term physical and mental health impacts,” the 197-page report notes.

Amongst the 12 recommendations of the House of Lords peer is a call for police forces and prosecutors to begin keeping accurate data on the ethnicity of perpetrators and for authorities to treat “children as children”. PTI AK GRS GRS