Tahir Abbas, Professor of Radicalisation Studies, Leiden University
The publication of Baroness Casey’s National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation this month is not the beginning of a story, but rather a climactic and damning chapter in a narrative of state failure that has haunted Britain for over twenty years.
In towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, and Telford, a specific and horrifying crime took root: the organised sexual exploitation of predominantly white working-class girls by gangs of men. For decades, the official response was defined by a repeating cycle of scandal, fleeting outrage, partial inquiry, and enduring injustice. Reports from journalists and whistleblowers were met with denial, legal threats, and institutional inertia.
It was against this backdrop of systemic failure that the Casey Audit was commissioned — a last-ditch attempt to impose clarity on a subject deliberately clouded by obfuscation, and to answer a question that had poisoned public discourse: why had the state so catastrophically failed to protect its most vulnerable children?
Casey’s official diagnosis is one of institutional paralysis, a “collective failure” born of a profound fear within police forces and local authorities of being branded racist or Islamophobic. The report documents how a reluctance to confront the disproportionate presence of men from Pakistani and other minority backgrounds in the local data hampered investigations and silenced debate (Casey, 2025). However, this explanation, although it holds some truth about institutional anxiety, is ultimately overly simplistic and convenient. It serves as a palatable mask for a far more disturbing and insidious reality. The failure to protect these children was not born of a misguided sensitivity. It was born of a profound and discriminatory contempt.
This analytical lens recasts the official narrative of institutional fear. The claim of being silenced by political correctness emerges not as a genuine reflection of operational constraints but as a disingenuous and politically expedient excuse. It functions as a socially palatable justification for a profound inaction that, in reality, stemmed from a compound of intersecting prejudices.
This narrative allowed state institutions to mask two core failures: a discriminatory lack of investment in the safety and wellbeing of predominantly working-class girls, and a prejudiced neglect of criminality manifesting within specific ethnic communities. The invocation of a “fear of racism” serves to obscure a more damning truth. The institutions did not act because they did not sufficiently value these specific victims or prioritise this specific crime. Their inaction was not a product of sensitivity, but of a deep-seated and discriminatory indifference. The ultimate institutional paradox, therefore, is that an organisation can fail to act because of its own ingrained prejudices, only to then publicly attribute that failure to external pressure, such as political correctness.
Baroness Casey’s audit, while framing the central problem as one of “denial,” provides all the necessary evidence to conclude that this denial was merely a symptom of a much deeper institutional malaise. This sickness is rooted in a complex lattice of discrimination that devalued the victim, disregarded the community, and ultimately, abdicated the fundamental responsibilities of the state.
The Casey Audit is a forensic account of how the British state devalued its most vulnerable. The victims were not a random cross-section of society. They were overwhelmingly White, working-class girls, many of whom were already in the care of the state and therefore its most direct and solemn responsibility. The report details a process of “adultification”, a cruel alchemy where these children were transmuted in the eyes of professionals from victims into complicit architects of their own destruction. They were not seen as children being systematically abused, but as “wayward teenagers” making poor choices. Their accounts were dismissed as unreliable, their lifestyles scrutinised, and their credibility questioned. All other failures stem from this foundational prejudice, which is rooted in a toxic mix of classism and misogyny. Institutions that view their charges with such contempt will never invest the resources, intellectual energy, or political capital required to protect them. The failure to prosecute was not an operational oversight; it was the logical and inevitable outcome of a system that had already passed a damning, discriminatory judgment on the victims themselves. Their class and gender rendered them unworthy of the state’s full protective power. This was not a system silenced by fear; it was a system silenced by its own indifference.
Simultaneously, the institutional response to the perpetrators reveals a different, more subtle, but equally damaging prejudice. The audit found a “palpable discomfort” and a consistent refusal by authorities to examine why men from Pakistani backgrounds were so disproportionately represented in the local data of towns like Rotherham and Rochdale (Casey, 2025). To frame this solely as a “fear of being called racist” is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of institutional discrimination. This was not a racism of hyper-surveillance, as is often seen in the policing of other crimes. It was a racism of neglect. It was a prejudiced, hands-off disengagement that deemed criminality within certain minority communities too complex, too sensitive, or simply not a priority for a predominantly White establishment. It reflects an insidious “othering”, where the state effectively absolves itself of the difficult work of understanding and engaging with the specific cultural drivers and social dynamics that may foster such offending. It is far easier to do nothing, and to later claim that your hands were tied by “political correctness”, than to admit you never had any intention of rolling up your sleeves in the first place.
The forces of the far right stepped into the void created by this institutional cowardice. For years, they have exploited the state’s failure, hijacking the real and profound suffering of victims to fuel a xenophobic and Islamophobic agenda. The institutional silence on ethnicity did not only hinder community cohesion but also created an ideal environment for hate. By refusing to engage honestly with the limited but clear data showing disproportionality in specific areas, the state allowed the radical right to define the narrative. Every time an official report, citing flawed national data, claimed the problem was “mostly white men”, it ignored the specific reality of places like Rotherham and, in doing so, sounded a dog whistle to those who believe in a grand conspiracy of cover-up. The victims, whose trauma should have been at the centre of a compassionate state response, were instead reduced to pawns in a vicious political game, their pain weaponised by extremists and their experiences invalidated by the very institutions meant to protect them.
This uncomfortable truth has profound implications. If the problem was simply a lack of institutional courage, the solution would be to mandate better data collection and encourage bravery. But if the problem is a deep-seated institutional contempt for the victims and a prejudiced neglect of the perpetrators’ communities, then the solution must be a root-and-branch cultural overhaul. The new national inquiry, promised in the wake of the audit, cannot be another exercise in identifying process failures. Its primary task must be to dissect this institutional pathology. It must have the power to investigate not just what happened, but why a particular child’s life was valued so little and why a particular crime was deemed unworthy of proper investigation for so long.
The Casey Audit has, perhaps unintentionally, provided the blueprint for its critique. It has laid bare the official excuse of “political correctness” and, in the same pages, provided the evidence to dismantle it. The report is a monument to a double failure: the state’s failure to protect its children, and its subsequent failure to be honest about its reasons. The path forward demands that we reject the convenient mask of a state paralysed by fear and instead confront the far uglier truth of a state enabled by its own prejudice. Only then can we begin to build a system where the value of a child’s life is never again determined by their postcode, their class, or their abuser’s skin colour.
References:
Casey, L. (2025). National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. London: HMSO.
Photo: Baroness Louise Casey, author of the National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
