Grooming survivors prosecuted as children still being failed, Baroness Casey tells BBC

Grooming survivors prosecuted as children still being failed, Baroness Casey tells BBC Just now Share Save Add as preferred on Google Fiona Trott , North of England correspondent and Ruth Green Getty Images Baroness Louise Casey says a scheme to quash convictions of child grooming victims does not go far enough Children who were groomed, sexually abused and then prosecuted for crimes, including prostitution, are still being failed, the author of a landmark report has said. Baroness Louise Casey, who led the national investigation into grooming gangs, called on the government last year to quash any convictions of victims who were criminalised when they should have been protected. The government has since introduced legislation to pardon "child prostitution" offences. However, in an exclusive interview with the BBC, Baroness Casey said that was the "lazy option" and did not go far enough, adding there should be a comprehensive scheme to look at quashing all wrongful convictions for victims. "I feel that they've gone for the easy option and, if I'm being more brutal, [the] lazy option of not setting up a disregard scheme with enough thought, enough care and enough action," Baroness Casey told the BBC. So far, she said, "they have failed". The Home Office said it would take forward Baroness Casey's recommendation to review criminal convictions that may have been shaped by a person's experience of being sexually abused as a child. A spokesperson said: "We encourage all those affected by these convictions to get in touch with the Criminal Cases Review Commission." The BBC has spoken to women who, decades on from being abused, said they were still being punished for crimes they were coerced into. Joanne, not her real name, is one of thousands of people who were groomed and sexually abused as children, but were criminalised from the 1990s to 2010s rather than protected. Joanne (left) whose name has been changed to protect her identity, told the BBC's Fiona Trott (right) she had been completely let down. She was groomed from the age of 15 and said she was raped and sexually exploited over several years by more than 500 men, all over the country. Joanne was repeatedly arrested as a child and, despite being under 18, she was treated as an offender and brought before the courts. She was 17 when she received her first conviction in Wolverhampton for loitering and soliciting in the early 1990s. In court, she was told she was a prostitute. "I didn't have the mental or the emotional maturity to understand what that meant," she told the BBC. But now – in her 50s – she recognises she was being raped. "Everybody told me that I was this problem - that I was guilty and I had committed a crime," she said. Her criminal record of more than 40 prostitution convictions has prevented her from applying for jobs, going to college, travelling abroad and even volunteering at her children's school. Joanne and thousands of people like her are due to be pardoned for loitering or