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The announcement of a national inquiry into group-based child sexual exploitation raises urgent questions: How did we end up here again? Haven’t there been enough reports? Why weren’t children protected the first time? And will these reforms actually change anything?

As someone who has worked for years in safeguarding policy and research into grooming, county lines drug trafficking and child criminal exploitation, I believe this moment could be different. For the first time in years, there is political momentum, public scrutiny and survivor-led demand for change all converging. But we have to honest about how we got here.

The inquiry, which will have full statutory powers, follows crossbench peer Louise Casey’s rapid national audit into grooming gangs. Her report lays bare what the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, described as a “collective failure” over 15 years. This phrase reflects not just high-profile cases in Rotherham, Rochdale or Telford, but a nationwide pattern of authorities disbelieving victims, delaying action and denying the scale of the problem.

Since 2014, inquiry after inquiry has revealed how children, often girls, care-experienced young people, or those from marginalised backgrounds were not listened to, with some dismissed by social services as making “life choices”. Despite the Jay report, the 2022 Telford inquiry, and the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, victims were often not seen as victims at all.

Seeing ‘children as children’

One of the most striking lines in Lady Casey’s audit came just before her 12 recommendations: “We need to see children as children.” This cuts to the heart of how so many victims were failed. When professionals view teenagers as complicit, consenting, or “making choices”, they stop seeing the child in need of protection.

Casey revealed that even today, many victims are still falling through the cracks because their exploitation doesn’t fit assumptions. The report revealed that cases involving 13- to 15-year-olds were too often dropped or downgraded from rape, with professionals referencing that the child was “in love” or had “consented”.

These interpretations ignore the law — which sets the age of consent at 16 — and more importantly, they ignore the power imbalance and coercion at the heart of grooming. Casey has called for the law to be unambiguous: any penetrative sex with a child under 16 must be classified as rape.

This failure to see children as victims is deeply embedded. In 2023, 706 group-based child sexual exploitation offences were recorded. A number dwarfed by the estimated 500,000 annual cases of child sexual abuse in England and Wales.

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One reason for this gap, as Casey’s audit acknowledges, is that “the results tend to obscure rather than clarify the picture of group-based child sexual exploitation”. Much abuse is made invisible by confusing and inconsistently applied definitions, where grooming is recorded under unrelated offence types such as gang or drug crime, rather than identified as exploitation.

In my own research and parliamentary evidence, I’ve repeatedly warned that when a child is caught carrying drugs or cash, they are too often seen as a criminal first — not as someone coerced, groomed or harmed.

These assumptions directly shape the outcome of a case. In earlier grooming gang cases identified in the various inquiries, girls were seen as “promiscuous” or as having “chosen” to associate with older men. These narratives made it easier for agencies to downplay reports, delay interventions or ignore disclosures altogether.

Casey rightly highlights how exploiters have taken advantage of the blurred legal and professional treatment of 13- to 15-year-olds in sexual exploitation cases. But it is concerning that proposed legislation (the crime and policing bill) appears to replicate the same flaws in how it treats child criminal exploitation. The bill introduces different assumptions about a young person’s “awareness” or involvement, even where grooming or coercion is present.

This risks embedding a double standard: one where a 14-year-old can’t consent to sex, but can be seen as knowingly trafficking drugs. Without urgent scrutiny, we risk repeating the same failures but under the banner of criminal exploitation. It is still child exploitation.

What’s different about these reforms?

The government has accepted all 12 of Casey’s recommendations, including making ethnicity data collection mandatory and fast-tracking rape charges for adults abusing under-16s.

It has also promised mandated data-sharing to finally resolve the communication failures that have dogged policing, social care and health services for decades.

The Casey audit underscores how urgent these reforms are. It found that two-thirds of recorded perpetrators had no ethnicity data captured, making it impossible to draw clear national conclusions. In areas like Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire, there was evidence of over-representation among men of Asian ethnicity.

But the data-sharing failures go far beyond demographics. In many serious case reviews, including ones I’ve worked on, key information held by one agency (such as frequent missing episodes recorded by police) were never pieced together across agencies. Mandated data-sharing could have allowed professionals to spot patterns of grooming earlier and intervene before exploitation escalated.

We’ve seen versions of these promises before. The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse made over 80 recommendations. The Jay report outlined repeated missed chances to intervene. In 2022, the Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse called for urgent reforms to how police and social workers identify and respond to child sexual exploitation. Many of those changes were either delayed, diluted or quietly dropped.

Some changes, such as the statutory inquiry’s power to compel evidence, are welcome. But legal duty doesn’t automatically translate into professional confidence or competence. The systems and infrastructure needed to enable professionals to share data consistently and safely still do not exist.

I’ve observed how even the most robust policy and guidance fails in practice because professionals are underresourced, overwhelmed, lack experience, or are unprepared to challenge risk-averse decision making.

For example, mandated data-sharing has been a goal since the 1980s. It was a central recommendation in the 1987 Cleveland inquiry and the 2000 Victoria Climbié inquiry, both of which dealt with child abuse. It has remained a consistent theme in reviews from the child safeguarding practice review panel and in my own national evaluations.

Yvette Cooper delivers a speech on the ‘collective failure’ in the handling of grooming gangs cases.
House of Commons/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Case reviews across four decades have cited the same failures: organisations not talking to each other, files siloed, risks misunderstood. In the cases explored in the Casey audit, better data-sharing could have helped agencies identify patterns of concern much earlier, including young people going missing from home or school, presenting at sexual health clinics, or being repeatedly reported in distress by family members, teachers and health practitioners.

Instead, these signs remained isolated. Without a full picture, no single agency recognised what was happening. Children were left unprotected while perpetrators continued to offend.

Unless we address why so many professionals have historically avoided taking action, whether due to fear of being seen as racist, fear of reputational harm, or simply not believing children, reforms may look good on paper but fall short in reality.

The Casey audit shows we haven’t just failed to act, we’ve failed to learn. “Collective failure” is a powerful phrase, but without collective responsibility, we risk repeating the cycle.

Michelle McManus has received funding from Home Office, Department for Education and National Independent Safeguarding Board Wales. She is also currently seconded as part of a Chancellor’s Fellowship at Manchester Met, with the VKPP, which is part of the National Centre for VAWG and Public Protection.