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The British government has announced a national survey of sexual abuse on children organized following the publication of an overwhelming report from Baroness Louise Casey which criticized decades of institutional inability to protect children from so-called “grooming gangs”.
He marked a remarkable return to U by the government’s government government Keir Starmer, who had resisted months of calls for an investigation, declaring that he was focused on the recommendations already made in a previous investigation of seven years.
But what exactly is the Casey report and what made the brutal change in work?
What is the Casey report?
Commissioned earlier this year by Starmer, the Casey report is an examination of the way in which the UK’s institutions have addressed the sexual exploitation of children.
The review focused on “grooming gangs” – groups of men who targeted vulnerable girls for sexual abuses, often over long periods.
What does the report say?
The report has identified an institutional inability to protect children and adolescent girls from rape, exploitation and serious violence.
Among its recommendations, the Casey report suggested a change in law, adults in England and Wales are faced with compulsory accusations of rape if they intentionally penetrate a child under the age of 16.
In his report, Casey concluded that too much grooming cases have been abandoned or demolished from rape to less accusations because a man from 13 to 15 years old is perceived as “lovers” or “agreed to” sex with the attacker.
His examination also underlined the authorities’ reluctance to “examine the ethnicity of offenders”, saying that he was not racist to do so.
In the local data that the audit examined from three police forces, they identified clear evidence of “over-representation among the suspects of Asian and Pakistani men”.
However, the journal has also criticized the current incapacity to collect ethnicity at the national level, with it not registered for two -thirds of the authors, which makes it impossible to provide a precise evaluation of the data collected nationally “.
Have the recommendations been accepted?
Yes.
Interior secretary of the United Kingdom, Yvette Cooper, confirmed that the government would accept the 12 recommendations of the Casey report.
This means that the police will launch a new national criminal operation targeting gangs of grooming, supervised by the National Crime Agency (NCA).
This operation would be supervised by an independent commission with Powers to force witnesses to provide evidence.
This would also go with a national investigation, Starmer declaring that he had read “each word” of the report and would accept Casey’s recommendation for an investigation.
What led to the work tour?
Richard Scorers, head of the law of abuse and public inquiries in Slater and Gordon, a law firm, told Al Jazeera that the size of the scandal and the fact that it had affected thousands of children had made it “inevitable” that a public inquiry would be needed.
The online references of the American billionaire Elon Musk with a grooming scandal that emerged ten years ago in several cities in northern England had also pushed the “problem of the political agenda,” he said.
In June 2022, an independent examination revealed that the police and the local council had not prevented the sexual exploitation of young girls by gangs in Oldham, a city in the Grand Manchester in England.
Two years later, the political leaders of the Oldham Council called on the government to investigate more, but the Minister of Offices at the time, Jess Phillips, rejected the council’s request, saying that she should investigate himself.
In January of this year, Musk threw his weight behind Far -right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who bears the name of Tommy Robinson and had been frank on the issue.
He asked RobinsonA controversial political figure, then serving a prison sentence of 18 months for contempt in court, to be released, writing on its own social media platform X, “why is Tommy Robinson in a lonely isolation prison for having said the truth?”
Musk also accused Starmer of not having pursued rapid children when he was director of public prosecution between 2008 and 2013.
He also targeted the Minister of Safeguard Jess Phillips, the appellant “an apologist for the rape genocide”.
Starmer responded at the time, without mentioning musk by name. “Those who disseminate lies and disinformation as far as possible are not interested in the victims, they are interested in themselves,” said the Prime Minister.
Will this report bring a change?
Experts say it’s certainly a positive step.
William Tantam, lecturer in anthropology at the University of Bristol, who worked on a previous independent survey on sexual abuse of children, said that from a researcher’s point of view, the main positive was that there would be more consistency and clarity in data.
He said that another positive is that the investigation panel will have the power to force the agencies to participate.
Scorer noted that bringing it to the NCA to investigate cases that have not progressed in the past is also a very welcome result of the report.
He said that in the United Kingdom, various police forces have not always managed to coordinate their efforts to tackle the grooming gangs, so a more centralized NCA overview could obtain “better coordination of police activities”.
Cooper told Parliament on Monday on Monday that more than 800 cases had now been identified for official examination, and it expects this figure to exceed 1,000 in the coming weeks.
But the goalscorer warned that the government should award an additional budget for the implementation of the changes recommended by Casey.
“If you ask the NCA to reopen and investigate, potentially up to 1000 cases, this will require a huge amount of resources,” he said. “Who will pay for that? This is one of the questions to which the government will have to answer.”
