Grooming gangs live: Baroness Casey to address parliamentary committee after inquiry announced

Watch live as Baroness Casey, author of a report into grooming gangs, gives an address to a British parliamentary committee on Tuesday (17 June).

Louise Casey, whose national audit was published on Monday (16 June), says there was a “collective failure to address questions about the ethnicity of grooming gangs”.

In her 200-page report, she called for harsher prosecution of men who have sex with under-16s to guarantee their charges are never downgraded from rape.

She said we have “failed in our duty” to properly understand this kind of group offending as she hit out at an “appalling” lack of data over offenders’ ethnicities.

“If we’d got this right years ago – seeing these girls as children raped rather than ‘wayward teenagers’ or collaborators in their abuse, collecting ethnicity data, and acknowledging as a system that we did not do a good enough job – then I doubt we’d be in this place now,” she wrote.

On Monday (16 June), Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told the House of Commons she would toughen laws and listed some of the 12 recommendations that Baroness Casey gave - all of which the government said it had accepted.

It comes after Sir Keir Starmer announced on Saturday (14 June) that he will begin a national enquiry into grooming gangs after “reading every single word” of Baroness Casey’s report.