Home secretary Yvette Cooper is in the Commons to deliver a statement on the Casey ‘Audit’ into rape gangs. Its findings and recommendations will be published shortly…
Cooper says more than 800 cases have now been identified for formal review, expecting that figure to rise above 1,000 in the coming weeks. She then lays out that the audit found:
– Victims as young as 10, often those in care, or children with learning or physical disabilities were singled out for grooming.
– Perpetrators still walking free because no one joined the dots or because the law ended up protecting them instead of the victims they had exploited.
– Failures to act upon risk or share critical information between social services, health services and police forces.
– Deep rooted institutional failures, stretching back decades, where organisations who should have protected children and punished offenders looked the other way.
– Casey identifies clear evidence of over representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men, and she refers to “examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions”.
– Ethnicity data is not recorded for two thirds of grooming gang perpetrators.
– Baroness Casey reports that she came across cases involving suspects who were asylum seekers.
Cooper announces the government will introduce:
Former leader of the SNP in Westminster Ian Blackford told Times Radio why he believes Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she spent no time in the kitchen and therefore didn’t see any of her husband’s purchases:
“She doesn’t have a passion for cooking.”