Public must ‘keep calm' over ethnicity of grooming gang offenders, says Louise Casey
The public must 'keep calm' over the ethnicity of grooming gang offenders, the author of a high-profile report has urged, saying police data from one region suggested that the race of child abuse suspects was proportional with the local population.
The comments from Louise Casey came as Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, defended herself from claims that she was attempting to politicise the scandal of the organised rape of girls by men across dozens of towns over at least 25 years.
Lady Casey's report on Monday found evidence of 'over-representation' of Asian and Pakistani heritage men among suspects of 'group sexual exploitation' of children, according to data from three police forces.
Related: Casey report forces Starmer's hand on issue that has haunted Labour for decades
Casey told MPs on Tuesday that she was concerned that the limited data available on the race and ethnicity of offenders was not being used responsibly as part of the public debate on grooming gangs.
She said the report examined data from Greater Manchester police (GMP), which covers towns including Rochdale and Oldham where convicted grooming gangs operated.
'If you look at the data on child exploitation, suspects and offenders, it is disproportionately Asian heritage,' she said. 'If you look at the data for child abuse, it is not disproportionate and it is white men.
'So just a note to everybody, outside here rather than in here, let's just keep calm about how you interrogate data and what you get from it.'
According to the report, GMP's figures showed that 52% of suspects involved in multi-victim/multi-offender cases of child sexual exploitation over a three-year period were Asian, compared with 38% who were white.
When examining suspects for all child sex abuse crimes, not just grooming, the same force's data shows that 16% were Asian and 44% were white, while 32% of suspects were of 'unknown' ethnicity. The last census figures show that 57% of Greater Manchester is white and 21% is Asian, according to the report.
Related: UK grooming gangs inquiry 'must confront uncomfortable truths'
Keir Starmer said later on Tuesday that Badenoch had done about grooming gangs when the Tories were in power and asked why she had not brought forward a mandatory duty for authorities to report child sexual exploitation when she was a minister.
'Why didn't you do it? Why didn't you say one word about it?' the prime minister asked in a direct message to Badenoch as he spoke to reporters at the G7 summit in Canada.
Starmer also defended his record, saying he brought about the first prosecutions of grooming gang members while director of public prosecutions, changed the rules to make gang prosecution easier and called for mandatory reporting, which the Conservatives rejected.
'I'm now the prime minister who has passed into law mandatory reporting, who has taken forward the unique identifier for children, because I've always been really worried that children falling outside of school are not being picked up, and they are very vulnerable to exploitation,' he said. 'And obviously now [I have] announced this national inquiry.'
Casey told the BBC's Newsnight on Monday that she was 'disappointed' by the Conservatives' response to her review of the grooming gangs scandal. 'We need to change some laws, we need to do a national criminal investigation, we need to get on with a national inquiry with local footprint in it, and ideally wouldn't it be great if everybody came behind that and backed you?' she said.
'I felt the opposition could have just been a bit, you know, 'Yes we will all come together behind you.' Maybe there's still time to do that. I think it's just so important that they do.'
At a hastily arranged press conference, Badenoch said she was 'not doing politics now' but criticised people who sought to 'tone police those who are pointing out when something has gone wrong'.
'I do think that we should take the politics out of it. But who was it that said when we raised this issue that we were pandering to the far right? That's what brought the politics into it,' she said.
Badenoch said her party backed a national inquiry into the scandal and had been calling for one 'for six months'.
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