What did local inquiries (e.g., Rotherham, Rochdale) conclude about perpetrator ethnicity and institutional response, and how do those findings compare to Casey’s audit?

1. Rotherham and Rochdale: what the local reports actually said about perpetrators and victims

The independent Jay inquiry into Rotherham documented horrific abuse of an estimated 1,400 children between 1997 and 2013 and reported that, in the cases sampled, most victims were white British and the majority of perpetrators were from minority ethnic communities — a finding echoed in the summary of prosecutions and local reviews in Rochdale and other northern towns, which highlighted multiple convictions of men of Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Afghan heritage for group-based sexual offences ^{[1] [5] [2] [3]}.

2. Institutional response in the local inquiries: denial, cover-up and ‘political correctness’

Local inquiries were unanimous in condemning systemic failures: council and police leaders repeatedly ignored reports, dismissed victims as ‘undeserving’ or ‘prostitutes’, and prioritised community relations and a fear of appearing racist over child protection — language used in the Jay report and subsequent inspections to describe organisational cultures that “shirked accountability” and tried to “not rock the multicultural community boat” ^{[1] [3]}.

3. What Casey’s audit added about data, denial and national patterns

Baroness Casey’s national audit singled out the same pattern of institutional denial and inadequate safeguarding across multiple localities, but put the spotlight on a crucial technical problem: ethnicity recording for suspects and perpetrators was “half-collected” and often absent — with instances cited such as police omitting ethnicity in two-thirds of cases in some forces and an instance where the word “Pakistani” had been tipp-exed out of a child’s file — leading Casey to conclude the existing national data are “not sufficient” to draw reliable conclusions about the ethnicity of group-based offenders at scale ^{[6] [7] [4] [8]}.

4. How local findings compare to Casey’s national judgement on ethnicity

The local findings that many high-profile convicted groups involved men of South Asian heritage stand as factual records of those prosecutions and sample reviews, but Casey’s audit refuses to accept that these local episodes can be extrapolated into a robust national pattern because of inconsistent recording and missing data; at the same time Casey argued that the number of convictions involving groups of men from Asian backgrounds in multiple areas “warranted closer examination,” creating a narrow middle ground between acknowledging local convictions and rejecting crude national generalisations ^{[3] [4] [9]}.

5. Competing narratives and the risks of politicisation

Casey explicitly warned that poor data collection had allowed competing and sometimes misleading claims — by media, academics and political actors — to flourish and to erode trust, and observers warned that emphasizing ethnicity could be exploited by far-right groups or lead to stigmatization of whole communities; critics including community advocates argue that institutional failure was driven by complicity and misogyny rather than race alone, and point to past flawed studies that exaggerated over-representation ^{[9] [10] [11]}.

6. Practical implications: what both strands of inquiry demand

Both the local reports and Casey’s audit converge on remedies: accountability for past failings, better child-protection practice, and, centrally, mandatory, consistent recording of ethnicity and nationality alongside robust new research — Casey frames that improved data as necessary both to bring perpetrators to justice and to prevent divisive misinformation, while local inquiries demand institutional reform and prosecutions grounded in the evidence that already exists in the court record ^{[8] [3] [6]}.