Baroness Casey is a cross-bench peer and social-policy fixer with a reputation for plain speaking. In 2025 she led the first national audit focused solely on grooming gangs in Britain, published on June 16th 2025.
Lady Casey's audit found that it is still impossible to know the full scale of group-based child sexual exploitation in Britain, in part because police forces failed to collect data and investigations were badly botched. Grooming gangs have been identified in dozens of towns and cities. In Rotherham alone, an unusually thorough investigation by the National Crime Agency identified 1,100 victims.
Her most significant contribution was on the role of ethnicity. She strongly criticised a Home Office report from 2020 which claimed, despite very poor data, that the ethnic composition of groups that sexually exploited children was likely in line with the general population. No such conclusions could be drawn, she said. She cited new data from three police forces showing that suspects were disproportionately of Asian heritage; in Greater Manchester, more than half were.
Lady Casey also highlighted sexism and classism running through the state: police often treated victims as "wayward teenagers" or adults who had made bad choices. Many were not believed; some were criminalised as child prostitutes.
The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.