Britain has yet to fully get to grips with the scale of violence against women. Today, the spotlight has rightly been on the failure to properly investigate the activities of “grooming gangs” which have committed staggering numbers of rapes of children. The scandal has been set out in excruciating detail in Baroness Casey’s audit of investigations into sexual exploitation in British towns and cities, published this afternoon.

The most explosive aspect of Casey’s report is an acknowledgement of data from three police forces that shows “clear over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men”. It confirms that some responsible authorities didn’t want to examine or record the ethnicity of offenders “for fear of appearing racist or raising community tension”. Flawed data was used to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs” as “sensationalised, biased or untrue”.

One consequence of this is that data on ethnicity of abusers wasn’t even collected in two-thirds of cases, something that will no doubt fuel conspiracy theories. But there is also evidence of a “deep-rooted” failure to treat young girls as children rather than consenting adults. None of this will come as news to anyone who has heard the stories of survivors or read previous reports into the activities of grooming gangs in towns such as Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford.

In one sense, this is part of a larger problem, which is suspicion and disbelief towards rape victims of any age. But the complicating factor in the grooming scandal is ethnicity, which terrifies Labour politicians. Shortly after Home Secretary Yvette Cooper finished speaking in the House of Commons today, Bradford West MP Naz Shah told other parliamentarians that “blaming entire communities” does not “protect victims”.

It felt like yet another denial of the misogyny that exists in some Asian communities. One of Labour’s most egregious mistakes has been a failure to recognise that men who grew up in villages in Pakistan — or rural Afghanistan, for that matter — don’t necessarily share liberal attitudes regarding fair treatment of the sexes. Asian women and girls in the UK are themselves victims of patriarchal assumptions, which are behind practices such as forced marriage, cousin marriage, and “honour” killings.

That British-Asian women suffer mistreatment as well points to another of Labour’s greatest errors, which is to think that the problem is ethnicity when it’s actually culture. That is what has led so many people in positions of authority — councillors, police officers, social workers — to turn a blind eye to sexual exploitation on an unthinkable scale. The terror of an accusation of racism has created a default position on the political Left that no one should raise the fact that some cultural attitudes pose a particular threat to women and girls.

It goes some way towards explaining why Keir Starmer resisted setting up a statutory inquiry for so long. And he still hasn’t apologised for characterising people who called for one as “jumping on the bandwagon of the far-Right”. Labour politicians could have avoided resorting to such slurs if they had faced the fact that some men living in this country have dreadful, culturally-ingrained attitudes towards women.

The Casey report is excoriating about all sorts of failures, but it doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know. What it does do is allow women to talk about the role of misogynist cultures in cases of sexual exploitation by gangs of men. Of course it’s true that rapists come from all sorts of backgrounds, but it actively obstructs justice if politicians, police and prosecutors refuse to recognise undeniable patterns of offending.

“To prevent it we have to understand it,” the report says of the grooming gangs phenomenon. Is that really too much to ask?

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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