Sex crimes by Asian groomers hushed up and dismissed, inquiry finds

CRIMES committed by Pakistani or Asian grooming gangs were covered up to avoid inflaming community tensions, a distressing report has revealed.

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Dame Louise Casey, in her review, said a "resistance and reluctance" to "acknowledge past mistakes, apologise and take action" led to immense suffering.

And asylum seekers and foreigners have also been linked to a "significant proportion" of grooming gang cases, it found.

An entire chapter of the Casey Review was labelled "Denial" and told how public bodies used “flawed data” to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs as sensationalised, biased or untrue”.

Officials feared being called racist if they spoke out against Asian or Pakistani grooming gangs.

It added: “Blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions all play a part in a collective failure to properly deter and prosecute offenders or to protect children from harm”. Home Secretary Yvette

Cooper said: "Perpetrators were walking free because no one joined up the dots or because the law protected them instead of the victims that they had exploited.

Officials dodged the issue of ethnicity among the groups of sex offenders for fear of being called racist, even though available data showed suspects were disproportionately likely to be Asian men, the Home Secretary told the House of Commons. Speaking as a review of grooming gangs by Baroness Casey was published yesterday,