A national audit into ‘group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse’, commonly referred to as ‘grooming gangs,’ has found victims were blamed, disbelieved, or dismissed by the very authorities meant to protect them.

Baroness Louise Casey was commissioned to produce the report earlier this year. She said the system failed due to ‘blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness, and even good but misdirected intentions’ which allowed abusers to escape accountability for years.

A key focus of the audit is the handling of ethnicity. Casey has criticised what she calls ‘half-collected’ data, arguing that the failure to properly record the ethnicity and nationality of perpetrators has obstructed justice and damaged public trust. ‘The worst thing you can do on an issue of race and ethnicity is half collect it,’ she told BBC Newsnight. In one case observed in Rotherham, Casey told Newsnight she ‘was going through a child’s file and I realised somebody had tipp-exed out the word Pakistani’.

Her report comes just days after seven men were convicted of raping and exploiting teenage girls in Rochdale between two decades ago. The perpetrators included taxi drivers and market traders of Pakistani heritage. The BBC reported that the judge commented that the girls were treated, ‘as though they were worthless’ as they were repeatedly abused.

Fiona Goddard, who was groomed and raped in Bradford as a teenager, told Newsnight: ‘We’ve not got the justice we deserve from the past and have not made an impact in the future.’

The report also highlights the evolving nature of abuse, noting that much of today’s exploitation begins online. ‘If Rotherham were to happen again today,’ a police expert told Casey, ‘it would start online.’ Digital spaces and social media now play a growing role in grooming and coercing children into sexual abuse.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper pledged to act on all 12 of Casey’s recommendations. These include: a new national criminal operation, treating group-based exploitation as serious organised crime; mandatory reporting duties; and making the collection of ethnicity and nationality data a statutory requirement.

Successive inquiries and reports were ignored, and ‘community tensions’ prioritised over safeguarding children. ‘But none of this will work unless everyone is part of it,’ Cooper told MPs.