Ethnicity of grooming gangs 'shied away from'

A culture of "blindness, ignorance and prejudice" led to repeated failures over decades to properly investigate cases in which children suffered appalling abuse and violence from grooming gangs, a report into the scandal has said.

- Rajeev Syal Pippa Crerar Jessica Elgot

The government has announced a public inquiry into the issue. The report's author, Louise Casey, said for too long the authorities had shied away from the ethnicity of the people involved and said it was "not racist to examine the ethnicity of the offenders."

Lady Casey said she found evidence of "over-representation" of Asian and Pakistani heritage men among suspects in some local data and criticised a continued failure to gather robust data at a national level.

The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, confirmed the government would accept all 12 recommendations of Casey's rapid review, including setting up a statutory inquiry into institutional failures, marking a significant reversal after months of pressure on Labour to act.

"While much more robust national data is needed, we cannot and must not shy away from these findings, because, as Baroness Casey says, ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities," Cooper said.

The number of cold cases to be reviewed over child sex abuse by grooming gangs is expected to rise to more than 1,000 in the coming weeks, Cooper said.

Adult abusers targeted children, mainly girls, as young as 10, some of whom were in care, had physical or mental disabilities or had already suffered neglect or abuse.

In the report, Casey said: "We as a society owe these women a debt. They should never have been allowed to have suffered the appalling abuse and violence they went through as children." On the question of ethnicity, the report said: "We found that the ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, so we are unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data".