Baroness Louise Casey

Nostalgia will not bring back the old order.

So, well, the first thing to say is, sadly, I'm not completely surprised.

I think that still, throughout the criminal justice system, which is essentially, you know, when people have to...

You have to go to court, you have to make statements, you have to go to court.

If it's rape or a sexual offence, sorry, this is, shall I just carry on?

It's quite, so, you know, you have to have a rape kit done, which is pretty rough, to say the least.

Very intrusive, yeah.

It's really challenging for both the person that is doing it but primarily for the victim.

On the whole, Adam, throughout history we haven't believed women and we certainly don't believe girls because we think that they are in love with older men and in love and therefore anything they say somehow doesn't have the same weight as if somebody has punched somebody in the face and I can see a bruise.

So there's a long history in the run-up to cases like that.

And when I did an audit last year, which was a decade on from when I was in Rotherham, where I did an inspection of the council into child sexual exploitation, I, at that point, thought we are getting something very, very wrong here.

And a decade later, I did an audit, a different word for review, just because there were lots of reviews, and so we had to find another word for it.

That's a light joke in the middle of a very serious conversation.

Everybody had their heads in the sand.

And essentially, what I found then is that...

We're really confused about what rape is, and we shouldn't be.

And if it was anybody's child in this room that, A, that young woman had experienced that we're talking about today, but B, the women now, girls before that I was interviewing in Rotherham...

We would see that sexual intercourse with a 12-year-old is automatically rape.

Sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old is not automatically rape.

Why not?