Baroness Louise Casey gestures with her hands during an interview

Yesterday Baronness Casey released her report into the grooming gangs entitled “National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse”.

The long awaited report came just days after PM Kier Starmer announced that there would be a statutory national inquiry into grooming gangs. Having previously said there was no need for such an inquiry, his change of heart came at reading the Casey report before its release and Starmer felt “it was the right thing to do”. Like a 1960’s Hollywood American cop, its all about the gut with Starmer and not from far right pressure.

“I have read every single word of her report and I am going to accept her recommendation. That is the right thing to do on the basis of what she has put in her audit,” he said. “I shall now implement her recommendations”.

What of the recommendations that Casey has made in her report?

I will briefly go over aspects of the report, which are important to understand background, before addressing some of the issues raised.

Of the 12 recommendations made in the Casey report which you can read yourself here (page 150 onwards). The vast majority highlight institutional failings and the poor collection and sharing of data. This includes the collection of data on the ethnicity of the offenders as well as the victims of sexual exploitation of children.

As an example:

Recommendation 4: The government should make mandatory the collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases and work with the police to improve the collection of ethnicity data for victims.

The need for a national inquiry is highlighted in recommendation 2.

Recommendation 2: A national police operation and national inquiry, coordinating a series of targeted investigations should be launched into child sexual exploitation in England and Wales

In coming to these conclusions Casey had to look through the many cases of grooming gangs and child sexual exploitation in doing so she made certain observations.

One of her observations was:

Ethnicity of perpetrators: The question of the ethnicity of perpetrators has been a key question for this audit, having been raised in inquiries and reports going back many years. 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.

It seems this report was less about understanding why grooming gangs exist, why young girls fall victim to them and more about coming to a vague conclusion that Asian men were the main perpetuators even though there is no national data to prove this.

This is something the media jumped on with many news websites fixating on the words “sheid away”, which is political report writing talk for we want to say its all the Pakistani’s but we won’t say it outright, let the media stoke the fires of hate and watch the far right burn down a mosque or two.

The next paragraph states:

Despite the lack of a full picture in the national data sets, there is enough evidence available in local police data in three police force areas which we examined which show disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination.

What Casey is trying to spin here is the lack of data collection was not due to incompetence or a lack of process, but because those collecting the data were too afraid of saying the P word when talking about the perpetrators of grooming.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said of the report:

“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,”.

Not sure Cooper is talking about the same report, despite the fact national data doesn’t exist, she is going to blame Muslims anyway.

The media response

There is little surprise in the way the media has responded , jumped onto institutional failings and spun them to blame Muslims.

Watching the BBC today I came across an interview with Maggie Oliver in which she was asked about the report. For those who don’t know Maggie Oliver resigned her position with the Greater Manchester Police over the way Rochdale grooming cases were handled. No doubt she has done some good work with the victims.

In this interview Oliver felt the need to keep repeating the words “Pakistani Muslim Men” , it was clear she was making a deliberate effort to get these words in whenever she could.

Note: she didn’t even bother to quantify her statement with the good old , “its not all of them, Moh down the road who puts my bins out seems alright”.

Statements like hers on national TV do nothing to help the previous victims, it does nothing to help future victims and it does even less for us to have an open honest conversation about a way forward. What it does do, is, fire up the far right against Muslims.

As a Pakistani Muslim man from one of the towns mentioned in the report, I feel no shame, I committed none of these crimes, I don’t need to justify my existence to Oliver, Cooper, Casey or the British media.

I don’t even need to say how Islam forbids the kinds of relationships these men were involved in, I mean isn’t it every other day we are told that Muslim women should uncover and be more ‘liberated’, as the recent burqa row shows.

The likes of Cooper can’t have it both ways either Muslims are a bunch of conservative outcasts or are ultra liberal to be engaging in these kinds of acts.

National conversation vs national inquiry

A national inquiry will not happen anytime soon even Starmer when announcing it wasn’t quite sure what it all entailed.

“It will be statutory under the Inquiries Act. That will take a bit of time to sort out exactly how that works, and we will set that out in an orderly way.”

Whenever it does happen, it will do nothing to address the issue, I am not coming from a position of a pessimist but simply being realistic. Much like its infrastructure building the UK is not renowned for its national inquiries or acting upon government reports.

The inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire eight years ago has been published for months now and still many of its findings are yet to be enacted.

The inquiry into Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Iraq War was a shambles

The McPherson report into institutional racism at the Met Police in the late 1990’s made little difference. With the Met still accepting it had a race problem decades after the report.

The Post Office inquiry, it took a TV show to get some justice for the victims, whilst Fujitsu execs got off scot free.

There is probably a better chance of getting the 115 charges against Manchester City through the door than a public inquiry coming to any meaningful conclusion.

The only thing a public inquiry will do, in the years it will inevitably take to conclude is create enough oxygen for the anti-Muslim brigade to feed their political careers off the victims of grooming gangs.

What we need is a national conversation

The sexual exploitation of children is an issue, the grooming of young girls for sexual reasons is an issue, some of those committing these crimes happen to be Pakistani just like many others happen to be White.

The report makes it clear there is no national data to prove the ethnicity question either way, to state the lack of national data and then come to a conclusion anyway based on three police forces is not exactly scientific. Sounds a bit like Tony Blair’s WMD report.

I’m no government report writer but it may have been more useful to put the processes in place first, collected the data, come to a national conclusion looked at regional disparities and moved forward from there.

Casey’s attempt to use a game of smokes and mirrors to “suggest” that Pakistani Muslims are blamed without having the intellectual fortitude to say so is worse than those who apparently “shied away” from the facts. Either you have the data or you don’t.

It is clear British society of which Pakistani Muslim men are a part, needs to do some self reflection. There needs to be some honest conversations about the kind of world we are creating for our children and the societal problems future generations will face.

Societal problems

One of these conversations is why young girls in the care system or not, feel the need to befriend men who are much older than them in order to feel worthwhile.

This is not to victim blame or make excuses for the criminals who committed these crimes, (as a Pakistani Muslim man I always need to caveat my statements, so much for freedom of speech) but in order to understand why these girls even accepted the attention of older men is a vital piece of the puzzle.

Social media, TV and the music industry do little to provide security to young girls, especially those who do not fit a narrow set of ideals for how they look or act. The societal over sexualisation of children is an accepted fact, the government’s way to tackle this is to introduce sex education for five year olds. That’s like teaching kids how to roll a spliff just in case they come across some weed.

The levels of insecurity young people feel are only exacerbated for young girls who come from broken homes without lack of a family unit and lack of money making them open to exploitation.

Many of the victims were out late at night unsupervised where they came across the men who exploited them. This accounts for some of the “disparity” in percentage of Asian men being the perpetrators, the majority of the night time industry such as take away workers and taxis are manned by Asian men. These men then gave them monetary incentives to engage in sexual activity.

Also there are many other disparities affecting the Pakistani community, lack of education, economic status, under representation in certain segments of the workforce all of these should be addressed as a whole.

A discussion around even when these young girls grow into women, their lives are not fulfilled until they achieve a ‘career’ or material success.

Women having to battle between wanting to be a mother and having a career, not for financial reasons but for ‘wanting to have worth reasons’. Capitalism pushing the idea that women must compete with and be exactly the same as men otherwise their lives remain somehow inferior.

Sexual exploitation of any age is not a race issue but a power issue. Once you create insecure young people the trap is all but set in a selfish world.

Just as the likes of Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Hugh Edwards, Phillip Schofield, Jermaine Jenas & Harvey Weinstein I could go on, all used their power and privilege to groom and use their victims. None of these men were Pakistani or Muslim. Some did work for the BBC though!

A conversation around power and influence and how society on the one hand pushes these ideas in a dog eat dog capitalist world. On the other then is unable to deal with the consequential fallout of having created a selfish, self centered mentality.

A society is made up of not just statistics and data, real societies are built upon values. Looking to prove an already held belief (unfounded by the way) that Muslims are the problem will not help anyone.

Islam promotes the coherent family unit, the need to look after ones parents, the need to understand the impact of your actions upon the wider society, neighbourliness, humbleness, self reflection, the obligation for ones responsibilities amongst other things.

Many of these things are sadly missing in modern Britain.

The fact some Muslim men choose to not ascribe by the Islamic values and groom young girls is a reflection of the problems the whole of society is dealing with, not Islam ruining society.

So let’s not look to massage the numbers but be real and tackle the challenges of society. Let’s tell our young girls their worth goes beyond their looks or if a man finds you attractive or not. Not by saying these things but our society reflecting these things.

Governmental failures

The government also needs to do some serious introspection into why there are continuing failings within its institutions such as the police.

If there is a lack of data collection in 2025, that is not a Pakistani Muslim man problem but a “what century are you living in” problem. Amazon can tell me what I need to buy on every 3rd Monday of the month, but the police don’t know who committed which crime.

If there is a lack of data sharing between various children services, thats not a Pakistani Muslim man problem but a “spend less money funding genocide and more money helping British kids problem”.

If the victims were blamed by the police, thats a policing problem. The police in UK don’t have a great track record when it comes to cover ups. They covered up the Hillsborough disaster, blaming Liverpool fans for decades. The covered up evidence when convicting IRA suspects, they failed to act on the murder of Stephen Lawerence. They also failed on act on Wayne Couzens a colleague who went to murder Sarah Everard.

The right wing would love us believe that the police force are perfect until it comes to Pakistani Muslim men. The data, and yes we have it this time says otherwise.

None of these failings can be used to deflect the blame onto Muslims on an assumption that if data was collected what it would show.

No more taking the blame

The Muslim community in the UK is continually the victim of political gaslighting, making us believe we are the cause of societal ills. We are the ones in the wrong, we should be ashamed and beg forgiveness at the alter of secular liberal democracy.

A political system that has witnessed in silence, funded and cheered on a genocide where children have been starved and sexually exploited by the Zionists, even maybe by the many British men and women who went to engage in the genocide.

Surely all children hold the same value? Sexual exploitation is sexual exploitation wether done by an Asian man in Rochdale or Zionists in Gaza. One under the cover of darkness, the other funded by UK tax payer pounds.

A system which fails to stop the proliferation of pornography and Only Fans but the likes of Yvette Cooper bemoan the lack of Muslim kids being referred to Prevent.

A Prime Minister who says things that “feel right”, just like it felt right to suggest cutting water and electricity to Gaza at the inception of the genocide.

All of these points are not to deflect blame as I said before the only people to blame for their actions are those who carried out the crimes. Unless we are now in a stalinist state where there is collective punishment.

They show how the Muslims are lectured about how uncivilised we are; wether that be in Rochdale, Rotherham or Ramallah.

Yet look what democracy has done to the world!

There is a clear agenda as always to spin any societal failings onto minorities rather than have the hard conversations. The politicians peddling this from all parties do so knowing it gets them more political mileage in a world leaning politically to the right.

To wider society I say, if you want to have these hard conversations let’s do that, as the saying goes “we live among you”.

To the muslim community leaders I say, lead these conversations, stop apologising and if needs be grow a back bone.

(My articles are written purely out of concern for the Muslim community and the wider society. Please consider subscribing, sharing this article. Please show your support by liking this article using the ❤️ below or even better restack )

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