The Casey Report: the case of the dog that barked (a bit)
What would be a more effective set of recommended actions to address the 'grooming gangs'?
Baroness Casey is to be applauded for the courage to recognise failures that have caused the ‘grooming’ scandal to last for decades (correctly, ‘gang raping’, but the term ‘grooming’ will be used here). She has explicitly identified institutional resistance to investigation, often rooted in fears of the charge of racism. She has also recognised the strong racial component to many cases — ‘white slags’. She has demolished some of British society’s worst actors, outright accusing them of lying or misleading the public. Never again will it be possible for any serious public figure to deny important aspects of this scandal.
However, her recommended actions are unambitious, and will be slow to have much effect. They include the following:
Amending the law on rape of a child to facilitate prosecution (copying other European countries), and quashing criminal convictions of victims to recognise their then-complex situations and ease their adult lives.
A lot of additional data collecting — including of ethnicity and nationality. Changes should be made to give unique identifiers and remove legal obstacles on data sharing, and so on.
Perpetrators are to be found and brought to justice; however, government bodies that stalled or frustrated action are merely to be identified. Government failures are not to be traced to specific decision makers.
The police should get better computers and investigate child sexual exploitation (CSE) as they would serious or organised crime.
Taxi licensing should be tightened up so that the out-of-region loophole is closed.
Finally, somewhat vaguely, research should be done, including in relation to cultural factors.
Now, this is a reasonable enough, if very safe, list. But what would be a more effective set of recommended actions, assuming current political, moral, and cultural conditions remain in place?
How could we better help victims? The Jay Report considered lifting the three-year limitation for grooming victims to bring civil damages claims but recommended against (unclear why). The state should amend the law to permit these cases, and where criminal liability has been found the civil damages case should be straightforward to prove. This would allow victims to bankrupt the people who raped them. While this is obviously not sufficient redress given the nature of the crimes, where financial restitution is possible, it should still be sought.
Where the police did not have sufficient evidence to bring criminal cases, they should review to see if the material would support a civil prosecution (admittedly with only financial penalties, but importantly, a lower standard of proof). Many cases are reported as being dropped, as gathering the required evidence is difficult. This would give an alternate path to prosecute old cases without up-ending the British legal system altogether.
Given Casey’s headline-grabbing comments on the ‘Asian’ background of many perpetrators, the state should make far more aggressive use of deprivation of citizenship where possible. (As an aside, as Hank from King of the Hill would say, ‘Okay, but are you Chinese or Japanese?’ Nobody has explained why officialdom has continued to use language so different from what is now customary usage, given increased East Asian immigration and American cultural influences.) The Home Secretary should have to explain why the state is not using that power in any proven grooming case, future or historic, rather than having to elect to use that power.
Defaults matter: ultimately, twelve years to deport someone is not trying; and if changes to the law are needed, they should be delivered. The number of deportations per year is tiny relative to the scale of abuse. There will be many abusers without foreign citizenship, and assuming current conditions, we are stuck with them now that transportation to the colonies is no longer an option, let alone hanging. (It is reasonable to say that hanging offenders would be better as restitution than deportation; however, let us assume for now that the death penalty is not going to come back, and that it is even less likely to be applied to those who have already been convicted.) However, the tiny numbers of deportations do not stack up considering the percentage of foreign-born in the UK generally (and even more once you factor in the age and ethnic skew of crime). We are not stuck with foreign-born rapists. Recidivism for these crimes is not unusual, and keeping them is a choice that the British state is making, putting vulnerable British women and girls at risk.
Similarly, rapists should not be permitted to move back to the town where their victims live. Casey notes that anonymity orders were often breached without consequence. She does not make any specific recommendation to identify the officials who chose to take no action. She also makes no recommendation on changing the law to make someone liable and easily prosecuted for these malicious acts against vulnerable people.
How could we better understand what has happened — despite the official blindness? DNA testing costs fifty pounds. All historic offenders should be required to present themselves at a police station; a quick swab, and all the gaps in our data could be filled within three months. If the government can’t do it, ancestry.com can.
These cases are hard to prosecute. They involve vulnerable young girls. In press reports, police often comment that investigation is difficult due to an extreme lack of cooperation from the wider community. The extent of complicity, or at least the culture of silence in these communities on the sexual abuse of the ‘outgroup’, is not seriously addressed by Casey at all: are these communities as a whole ‘guilty’? And if so, what precisely are they guilty of? This culture of silence prevents not only prosecutions, but a proper understanding of what actually happened. Needless to say, she also does not engage with the worrying implications that this has for jury trials.
The report makes clear that ‘grooming’ is correlated with other illegal behaviour, from the relatively minor to the very serious. Drug dealing is one example of the latter (and one that was not sufficiently explored by Casey), but in terms of the former, more aggressive enforcement of, say, selling alcohol or vapes to minors pays for itself — if the fines are set high enough. Those who would commit serious crimes will often commit more minor crimes as well, and the intelligence generated helps police. Casey vaguely recommends using the same techniques as against organised crime; famously, Al Capone was caught for tax evasion. Collecting evidence on these more minor crimes could help in building a broader case.
Casey touches on the distress of victims having to testify to the same painful events repeatedly when multiple rapists were involved. She does not go into detail as to why joint enterprise or similar concepts can’t be used. She makes no recommendation on determining how to modify the legal framework to reflect the pattern of offending and the community issues that frustrate investigations. Some cases had indications that hundreds of people had taken part in assault, but only a handful made it to prosecution. With that degree of prevalence, it should be obvious that the law needs different tools. The changes to US law to deal with the insular nature of the Mafia are a historical precedent. We need our RICO.
Casey makes non-specific references to better reporting duties from healthcare as being a tool to identify victims, many of whom wanted help but were afraid to go to the police themselves. She covers, and correctly dismisses, the worry that this would dissuade people from seeking help (net benefit is the criteria). It should be remembered that despite Blair actually giving the UK an extremely practical and effective law against FGM, there have only been a handful of prosecutions in the past two decades. A reporting obligation on medical professionals (similar to the one recommended here) would have avoided tens of thousands of victims. Permitting mutilation is a choice — one our governments have chosen.
The recommendation to close the loopholes on out-of-region taxi licensing is a good one. Given that regulations on taxi licensing are not exactly strict in Britain, the authorities should ask why someone went to a different region in the first place. Anyone operating out of their region would prima facie be sensible to screen.
Finally, the most important part and the one furthest from Casey’s mind: what recommendations could Casey have made — but didn’t — to fix the broad-based institutional desire to ignore, and indeed cover up, these crimes? It should be remembered that this problem has lasted for decades. This has been ignored, minimised, and distorted for all of that time. Problems persist until you honestly face them. There are twenty-two references I counted to institutional resistance to stopping rape, and she also makes a similar number of references to the ethnic dimension of these crimes.
Perhaps the most important principle that Casey has failed to introduce is individual responsibility. Organisations don’t take decisions, people do. The report discusses a review of Rochdale, where the authority stalled an investigation for three years on the basis of ‘data protection’. This was clearly, and ultimately shown to be, a spurious excuse. A rapid review taking three months to identify the specific people who most actively frustrated investigations or misled the public could generate a list. In parallel, a task-team of lawyers could determine what cases can be brought against individuals who use their role to pervert the course of justice — malfeasance in public office is floated, but I wonder what else an imaginative lawyer could identify? A selection of the most egregious cases from the rapid review could then be prosecuted. Change the incentives, and only then will you change behaviour.
Why were people afraid to act? Some, although probably only a small minority, would have been corrupt (the extent of corruption in British local government and policing has been seriously underexamined) or even directly involved (it is known that some councillors and officials had close connections to confirmed abusers). But most — as is recognised repeatedly — were primarily afraid of the R-word. An accusation of ‘racism’ is seen as career ending. This almost inherently allows abuse of the system by bad actors. It gifts the cynical a powerful tool in internal competition for promotions.
We now have a report that explicitly acknowledges that fear of ‘racism’ allegations was an important obstacle to stopping the mass rape of young girls. Yet, the next morning, much of the news coverage was about whether this report would make racists ‘happy’. Frankly, who cares? If uninhibited data gathering reveals cultural differences, and we can use that information to prevent the rape of children, that is a good thing. Even if you’re a fanatical ‘anti-racist’, that some racists might then cry ‘told you so’ is ultimately of negligible importance compared to fewer children being raped. This moral calculus should not be difficult. That it apparently is difficult must be directly addressed.
We must acknowledge the constraints people live under. If racism allegations are used as a risk-free tool to pressure organisations or for cynical interpersonal competition, then we need to change that. A false accusation of racism needs to be seen not as someone being overly careful to ensure fair behaviour; it needs to be judged by the consequences on investigating and preventing very serious crimes. Part of the irony is that actual racism featured in some of the reported abuse — ‘white slags’ — including from the families of the rapists. Apparently, this did not concern officials.
This is not helped by the establishment’s schizophrenic approach to race. If we are all the same and to be treated equally as British citizens, then why are race-based policies even legal? MI5 advertised for posts that were only open to those who were not white (sadly, unlike apartheid South Africa, they did not specify what degree of white blood was disqualifying). Similarly, if cultures are different and enrich us through their diversity, then as adults we should acknowledge that some differences will be good; others bad. And yet, differences in success or offending are typically attributed to racism on the part of society or the authorities. Logically, that cannot be so. Sadly, when we look across the world at the prevalence of gang-rape, we find cultures do differ. We can ignore this and put children at risk; or we can recognise that life makes us bet, and some stakes should not be laid. Casey indirectly touches on this with her brief reference to asylum seekers’ involvement in sexual assault today. It would not have been necessary to include this if it were at the same rate as the general population. However subtly, the hostage is winking at us and hoping we understand her message: bring help.
Legal obstacles to individual responsibility will be claimed. Nonsense: a police officer with an exemplary record can be fired for rudeness to a yob resisting arrest. If we can strip him of his livelihood so easily, why has no senior official suffered any punishment for frustrating enforcement and thereby enabling thousands of rapes? Similar stories can be told on DBS vetting and ability to apply for specific jobs; or the near-automatic assumption of guilt in relation to misselling (‘Have you ever seen a car? You could be owed money’). When the state wishes to act, it can. Everyone can see that the state is putting taking care of its own ahead of doing its job. Casey has done nothing to address this.
A society is not judged by its words, but by its actions. Society as a whole does not owe the victims an apology — after all, many within society have been disgusted and frustrated by their government’s lack of action. So what do we owe them? We owe them honesty. We owe them vengeance on those who abused them. We owe that vengeance both as restitution and as a warning.
If the government is right, then nobody will fear this message. If the government has been lying, then we owe it to the future victims to change course now.
This article was written by an anonymous Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.
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Of interest. But I remember reading in the Metro paper that some of the girls had actually fallen in love with their abusers. Others had been paid. So perhaps the situation is not so black and white. No that this could justify the abuse, of course...😉