The author of a damning report into grooming gangs has revealed she found the word ‘Pakistani’ “tippexed out” in archive files about child victims.
Louise Casey, whose national audit on grooming gangs was published on Monday, said “do-gooders” had covered up information on race and ethnicity believing that otherwise “all the racists are going to be more racist”.
Speaking to Sky News after the publication of her report, she said: “I was following through on a children’s file in archive and found the word ‘Pakistani’ tippexed out.
“I thought whoever did that inadvertently was giving ammunition to the English Defence League that were every week, in and out, campaigning and doing their stuff in that town.
“I think the problem is that people are worried about being called racist…. if good people don’t grasp difficult things, bad people will, and that’s why we have to do it as a society.”
She said not collecting more data on the ethnicity of grooming gangs does a “disservice” to the British Pakistani community and could leave them at risk, saying it was only helping perpetrators not to bring a fuller picture to light.
Baroness Casey’s highly critical report called for tougher prosecution of men who have sex with under-16s to ensure their charges are never downgraded from rape.
And she said the UK “failed in its duty” to properly understand this kind of group offending as she hit out at an “appalling” lack of data over offenders’ ethnicities.
“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,” she wrote.
Yvette Cooper accepted and vowed to immediately act on the 12 recommendations in Baroness Casey’s report, including holding a time-limited national inquiry and mandatory collection of data on the nationality and ethnicity of perpetrators.
The home secretary described Baroness Casey’s findings as “damning”, adding: “She has found continued failure to gather proper robust national data despite concerns being raised going back very many years.
“In the local data that the audit examined from three police forces, they identify clear evidence of overrepresentation 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.”
The national inquiry into grooming gangs will aim to tackle “continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling”, she added.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the probe “must start with known hot spots” such as Bradford and Rochdale as she hit out at the prime minister for “dithering and delay”.
