Recent developments surrounding child sexual exploitation

This week has seen has again seen child sexual exploitation back in the media spotlight, after Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced he was launching a National Inquiry into group child sexual exploitation, often referred to as ‘grooming gangs’.  This marks a significant but very welcome policy shift.

This change is down to Baroness Louise Casey’s National Audit on group based sexual exploitation and abuse which was published on 16th June 2025.  She made 12 recommendations within her report;

1. The law in England and Wales should be changed so adults who intentionally penetrate the vagina, anus or mouth of a child under 16 receive mandatory charges of rape
2. A national police operation and national inquiry, coordinating a series of targeted investigations should be launched into child sexual exploitation in England and Wales
3. Review the criminal convictions of victims of child sexual exploitation. Disregard any convictions where the government finds victims were criminalised instead of protected
4. The government should make mandatory the collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases and work with the police to improve the collection of ethnicity data for victims
5. Mandatory sharing of information should be enforced between all statutory safeguarding partners in cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation. Compliance should be monitored by the inspectorates and overseen by the proposed Child Protection Authority
6. The Department for Education should move swiftly to introduce unique reference numbers for children to improve opportunities for agencies to better share their information about children at risk of child sexual abuse
7. Police information systems should be upgraded. These systems should also provide for the use of the unique reference numbers for children which are being introduced by the Department for Education
8. CSE investigations should be approached like Serious and Organised Crime
9. The DfE should urgently interrogate child protection data to identify the causes of the decline in child sexual abuse and exploitation representation in child in need assessment data; examine the reasons for variations across local authorities; and review the effectiveness of Serious Incident Notifications in relation to child sexual abuse and exploitation
10. The government should commission research into the drivers for group-based child sexual exploitation, including online offending, cultural factors and the role of the group
11. The Department for Transport should take immediate action to put a stop to ‘out of area taxis’ and bring in more rigorous statutory standards for local authority licensing and regulation of taxi drivers
12. The government should commit to fully resourcing the implementation of these recommendations over multiple years and to tracking their implementation across Departments and other organisations, with regular reports to Parliament

Baroness Casey highlighted the failures to understand this kind of group offending and ‘appalling’ lack of data, she wrote;

“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.”

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has pledged to take immediate action and implement all 12 recommendations made by Baroness Casey and in her address to Parliament she said the report’s findings identify;

“deep rooted institutional failures, stretching back decades, where organisations who should have protected children and punished offenders looked the other way”

In practice this should mean a legal overhaul; so that any adult having sexual relations with a child under the age of 16 automatically faces rape charges, better coordination across organisation such as police, local authorities and safe guarding bodies with better IT systems in place to track and monitor child sexual exploitation cases and hopefully it should see support for victims with their wrongful convictions overturned. 

A Child Protection Authority which was first recommended by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse was further endorsed by Baroness Casey’s report as a vital mechanism to support her other reforms and should be created as a priority.  And whilst this was supported by the Government following the IISCA report there has been very limited action so far with the setup of such an Authority, hopefully  with Baroness Casey’s re-emphasis progress can now be made.

The coming months will show whether these steps translate into stronger protections, justice for survivors and prevention of future abuse but it is clear it is one of the most significant pushes yet towards systemic change we have seen in child sexual exploitation and abuse.