The UK’s latest Casey review, this time into group-based sexual exploitation and abuse has missed an opportunity to tackle a longstanding, appalling culture of crime. Instead it has simply scapegoated Pakistani Muslim men and amplified Islamophobic rhetoric, argues Saqib Deshmukh.

I remember a few years ago being in a Continuous Professional Development (CPD) session with a number of professionals in Hackney doing some training on equalities and we did an exercise on how we perceive each other. In my group a female youth worker/manager turned around during this activity and said to me that she saw all Asian men as potential abusers. I have to say I was shocked (it takes a lot to do that at my age) but it was challenged safely by others in the room, and she apologised later.

I keep coming back to that particular episode whilst thinking about the current situation we’re in and having read the recent audit report by Louise Casey on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. As a Pakistani man who has worked with children and young people for the last 30 years and had safeguarding responsibilities as well leading on this at a sector, borough and city level in different roles I’m feeling all this personally. I have been a school Governor/Chair, a Senior Practitioner, a Director of Young people and Families as well as  running a youth justice charity. As part of this I have sat on Children’s Trusts Boards and Social Services Serious Case Review groups dealing with both Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) and Abuse (CSA).

I can see where this is all going and it’s a dangerous road that we are on that is full of racist tropes and Islamophobia about ‘grooming gangs’ and will no doubt lead to the kinds of violence that we saw last summer. In the last decade there have been a number of racist murders  of Muslim elders with cases such as Muhsin Ahmed in 2015 in Rotherham where there has been a link to ‘grooming’. Many of us have been here before and we know the tired script and the raucous demand to have a national inquiry has been meet in the context of right wing and Reform pressure where these views have essentially become mainstreamed .

Over the last 15 years the spectre of grooming gangs has dominated discourse around South Asian men particularly those who are of Pakistani origin. It has been no surprise that many of these incidents have happened in places like Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford – places in the North of England which have suffered the most from the decline in industry and had a detrimental impact on all communities.  This trope around ‘grooming’ has become a key narrative in terms of how Pakistani men are seen in the public sphere and was probably on the mind of my colleague when we were doing the exercise on perception in Hackney. The fact that the term is almost invariably prefaced with Islamic, Muslim Pakistani or Asian shows how persuasive it has become in standard everyday discourse.

The new National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSEA) was commissioned by the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary in January 2025 and formally launched in February 2025 and carried out by Baroness Louise Casey.

Firstly, let’s go to the audit and some of its initial findings and recommendations:

A lack of and poor recording of data – I agree this is a problem, but it shouldn’t be a barrier, and my experience of police forces up and down the country is that it not only requires better systems but the will to implement these and ensure accuracy.  But as we know through cases like Child Q and many others involving Black and racialised children, police forces are not necessarily child friendly and for many of us, they too are sources of harm and abuse. Casey additionally points out that:

‘There is no data published by children’s services about group-based child sexual exploitation and that  also there has been a decline in the number of serious case reviews about child sexual exploitation in recent years.’

But of course, data doesn’t always show the whole picture and without understanding the wider context cannot give us the full picture. We know from the discredited Quilliam Foundation’s ‘grooming gangs’ report from 2017 that the findings and data that were shared were largely incorrect and deeply dangerous in how they tried to show over-representation of Pakistani men in such crimes.

Ethnicity and over-representation – the arguments presented here are too simplistic and not rooted in any comprehensive knowledge of Pakistani communities in this country. We have to look at where men from Pakistani communities are employed and often this is in the night-time economy and in particular taxi drivers and restaurants where they  will invariably be in contact with children and young people who are vulnerable. Bringing in more rigorous statutory standards for local authority licensing and regulation of taxi drivers is understandable but there is a danger that this will put existing Pakistani owned firms  out of business and have a knock-on effect on employment. Karamat Iqbal in his pioneering book ‘British Pakistani Boys, Education and the Role of Religion: In the Land of the Trojan Horse’ (2019) examined the low levels of academic performance in Birmingham of Pakistani young men and identified policy neglect as well as analysing the ‘Trojan Horse’ case as an example of how education can become weaponised by the Right against Muslim communities.

It will be interesting to see what new data is produced given how poor police forces have been in terms of producing accurate information and some of the struggles that Insaafi has had getting information about child strip searching in Wales and use of Prevent powers in a protest context. So, the recommendation for the mandatory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases is welcome but let’s see how this works in practice and what data is collected on both victims and perpetrators and crucially, how this is all framed.

But I have to say that Casey does not mention that not all victims have been white and so few commentators raise the fact that many victims of child exploitation are Asian. In 2025 we still automatically assume that the victims in these situations are white. This does a massive disservice to those Asian girls/young women (as well as those who are Black and racialised) who are even less likely to be believed and there is a massive perception gap here around who victims as well as perpetrators are. The erasure of victims and survivors and neglecting their needs is a theme that Cockbain and Tufail reference in their article ‘Failing victims, fuelling hate: challenging the harms of the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’. I know from my experience as a senior youth worker for more than a decade in High Wycombe that Thames Valley Police were largely not interested in child protection cases that involved Asian/Muslim young women. In the audit the use of the ‘Smith algorithm’ by West Yorkshire police was cited as a way to look at risk factors such as children not attending school or being in care and we hope that the recommendation to use this as best practice extends to all our children.

Now my next observation from the review is going to be controversial, but I have never been one to shy away from this. White supremacy and patriarchy always work hand in hand sadly across ALL communities of men this can become learned behaviour unless we are self-aware and conscious of our male conditioning. The organised abuse of children by groups of men is part of British culture, particularly the ruling class. Think of private schools, abuse in care homes and the Church across the four nations. It is grossly unfair that Pakistani men are being targeted and ‘collectively punished’ as Shabna Begum from Runneymede has stated recently. The framing of this as ‘toxic Pakistani masculinity’ needs to be challenged as well as the racial exceptionalism that surrounds this discourse.

‘The problem isn’t about certain communities of men, it’s about men who have power and behind them sits a whole apparatus of the police, of social services of agencies and they have a statutory legal requirement to intervene, and what was very concerning for me as someone who has been working with young people for the last twenty or thirty years as that those young people were failed.’

Interview with Women’s Resource Centre 2014

The trafficking of children needs to be examined, and I know at a local level in Buckinghamshire white taxi companies had contracts to transport children to and from care homes. When the Pakistani firms took over, sadly it became business as usual in terms of group-based child sexual exploitation. In my personal view, the police and the authorities turned a blind eye not due to race and ethnicity but due to their own complicity. The evidence for this came out in the Jay report on Rotherham  in 2014 and the role of male Council officers and senior police leadership and I spoke about this at the time. Too many folk in power saw these victims as ‘child prostitutes’ and undeserving of support let alone getting any kind of justice against the perpetrators. The new Independent Commission on Grooming Gangs that is mentioned in one of the recommendations will need to ensure that it looks at the historic failures of the authorities rather than seeing this as a way to further pathologise our communities. Additionally, I hope that the disregard scheme for the convictions of individuals who were found guilty of prostitution offences as children again extends to children who are Black and racialised.

So, I’m not in denial, I just don’t see this as just a Pakistani/Muslim problem – it’s society wide as misogyny and sexism are so deeply embedded. But as a youth worker in our communities, I have never shirked from confronting these issues. Twenty years ago, I worked with Barnardo’s in High Wycombe on a pioneering project that looked at early forms of ‘grooming’ and what was happening at a street level and did loads of amazing work with both Pakistani young men and women in tandem with local women’s groups and the main mosque. The recommendations from this work led to the creation of new services and better intervention at an early stage by social services.

Ultimately you want to blame us for your own failures – the failures of the police and social services to believe young working-class and vulnerable girls of all backgrounds who were coming forward. The failure to tackle the institutionalised child abuse and exploitation that is so ingrained in this country. If you want the evidence, go and look at the many His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) reports which assess how police forces protect children and vulnerable people and the very many failings that exist in these up and down the country. Any research which is commissioned into the drivers for group-based child sexual exploitation needs to go beyond simplistic explanations and ‘cultural factors’ and really understand the historical context that abuse has taken place in and the role of the police.

Casey was able to give a critical and impartial view of the Metropolitan police in her 2023 review and as the interim CEO of the Alliance for Youth Justice at that time I commented on this. Whilst we were generally supportive, I also raised some key concerns about  the absence of the voices of children and young people in the review. I feel that any review of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse has to include not only victims’ voices but those from Pakistani and Muslim communities across the country and in different spheres, as well as youth workers and practitioners.

I and many others from these backgrounds welcome any initiative that can reduce CSA/CSE, that can improve data collection and lead to better interventions and support, but this cannot come at the expense of slandering whole groups and creating a racist and Islamophobic backlash. We can’t have a situation that will fuel further racism by having a focus on one set of men who are already more likely to receive longer sentences (for drug related crimes) and who are disproportionately represented in the prison estate as Muslims.

Ultimately Pakistani men are an easy scapegoat in this context and sadly we and our communities are the ones that will be made to suffer together with the many children who are now adults fighting to still be believed.

Saqib Deshmukh is director of Insaafi CIC, an activist, youth worker and writer. Saqib has been active in policing and social justice campaigns with children and young people over the last 30 years. He has experience of frontline work in different parts of the country and of safeguarding practice across five local authorities and was on Leicester Children’s Trust Board in 2010-2012 and the Child Q Core Review Group in 2021-2022. Between 2016 and 2021 he served on the Board of the Institute of Race Relations and recently was the Interim CEO at the Alliance for Youth Justice. He is currently Director of Insaafi CiC a new not for profit that combines the worlds of arts, heritage and justice