Casey says abused children are still being failed by justice system

The Criminal Cases Review Commission’s referral of Ms AB, a young teenage girl, back to the courts on 26 May 2026 has exposed how far the justice system still has to go in undoing the damage done to children who were abused and then criminalised. Baroness Louise Casey has warned that victims punished when they should have been protected are still not getting the redress, record-clearing and support they need.

Casey’s National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse was commissioned by the Prime Minister and Home Secretary in January 2025, formally launched in February, submitted on 6 June 2025 and published on 16 June 2025. It said children and teenage girls were blamed for crimes perpetrated against them, and warned that the perceived lack of credibility of adolescent victims can still affect prosecution decisions. That remains a central failure point: the system can still treat exploited girls as unreliable witnesses rather than as victims.

The government moved later in 2025 to disregard and pardon unjust “child prostitution” convictions and cautions handed down before the law changed in 2015. But Casey’s criticism goes beyond historic record-clearing. Her concern is that victims prosecuted as children remain inadequately protected and supported, and that clearing a conviction does not automatically repair the wider damage done by policing decisions, prosecutorial choices or the absence of meaningful compensation.

The issue was laid bare in Parliament on 16 June 2025, when Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said grooming gangs remained a matter of support and justice, and noted that seven men had just been found guilty of horrendous crimes in Rochdale between 2000 and 2006. That case underlined the long lag between abuse, investigation and conviction, while survivors continue to live with the consequences of decisions made when they were children.

The CCRC says it has referred more than 900 criminal convictions or sentences back to appellate courts since 1997, which shows how unusual Ms AB’s case is and how legally significant it may become. The statutory Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs, published by the Home Office in December 2025 and updated in March 2026, was meant to confront the institutional failures behind child sexual exploitation and abuse. Casey’s warning is that the real test is no longer whether the failures are recognised, but whether police, prosecutors and ministers finally stop punishing victims twice.