Why are politicians weaponising grooming gang survivors?

The News Agents

Global

Daily News, News, Government, Politics

4.2 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Louise Casey's report on grooming gangs is incredibly tough reading. She details, over 200 pages, the repeated failings of local authorities, police forces, government departments and indeed the legal system, which treats the victims of the most horrific abuse as somehow culpable.

She was tasked to look into the issue following a clamour for a national inquiry earlier this year. Bundled up in those calls - propelled by Elon Musk - was the claim that Pakistani men were responsible for the vast majority of "group-based" child sexual exploitation offences. Baroness Casey has looked at that claim. She has found a comprehensive failure of adequate data gathering, although from the records of three police forces says there is an "over-representation" of Asian and Pakistani men. She is concerned about the politicisation of the debate, the risks of racists hijacking the issue, and most profoundly, about fixing a system which still sees girls subject to heinous abuse at the hands of male predators.

Baroness Casey came in to speak to Emily and Lewis, as the Prime Minister backed her call for a new national inquiry.

The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity.
0:09.3	This is a global player original podcast. I mean, all of this is a gift to the racists. If good people
0:16.5	don't look at difficult issues, bad people will, and even worse people will then exploit them.
0:22.4	That is Baroness Louise Casey. She led the national audit on grooming gangs. She's pulled
0:27.7	no punches in her report, and she's speaking to us today about the victims of sexual grooming,
0:34.2	the perpetrators of grooming, and what she fears if we don't get this right?
0:39.1	The Prime Minister initially did not want a national inquiry into this question. Neither
0:43.6	originally did Louise Casey herself. She thinks there should be a reset, a chance to take all
0:50.2	of the politics out of this. But what hope for that is there when so many people seem to
0:56.2	just want to see what they want to see in what she said. Welcome to the newsagents.
1:06.2	The Newsagents. It's Emily. It's Lewis. And Louise Casey is back where she has been for pretty much the last decade,
1:14.6	talking about why questions into grooming gangs, and by grooming gangs, we often mean,
1:19.7	frankly, the rape of children, why questions about this seem to have gone unanswered or untended
1:26.1	for so long when the entire country knew what was going on.
1:30.4	Yeah, just to remind you about how we got to this point.
1:33.1	Louise Casey was asked by the Prime Minister to try and assemble together the facts on what we know about grooming gangs,
1:41.0	and specifically whether the data tells us that there is as many people
1:45.1	have said particularly on the right of politics and in the right wing media have suggested that
1:49.6	there is a particular problem among Pakistani men in particular in terms of child-based sexual
1:55.6	exploitation obviously as Emily just said this story has been running for a very, very long time.
2:02.6	15 years near enough. You might remember we did an episode near the very start of the year with Andrew Norfolk,
2:07.6	an investigative campaigning times journalist who did a great deal to expose this question and this issue.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Global, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Global and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.