In the report, Baroness Casey said: “We as a society owe these women a debt. <\/p>\n
“They should never have been allowed to have suffered the appalling abuse and violence they went through as children,” she added.<\/p>\n
On the question of ethnicity, the report said: “We found that the ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, so we are unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data”.<\/p>\n
However, it added that at a local level for three police forces – Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire – there was enough evidence to show a “disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation”.<\/p>\n
Cooper said: “Ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities.”<\/p>\n
Lady Casey later said the data should be investigated as it was “only helping the bad people” not to give a full picture of the situation, adding: “You’re doing a disservice to two sets of population, the Pakistani and Asian heritage community, and victims.”<\/p>\n
The report criticised the “failure” of the authorities to “understand” the nature and scale of the problem to date.<\/p>\n
“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,” the report stated.<\/p>\n