16-06-2025
I welcome the grooming gang inquiry but people need to be prosecuted
'Unrapeable' is the word that always sticks in my mind. A policeman more than 15 years ago described one of the victims of the grooming gangs this way. This unrapeable thing, dehumanised and up for unspeakable violation, was actually a 13-year-old child with blood running down between her legs. The word 'child' matters here because there has been a fundamental refusal to see the girls trafficked around the country and abused by countless men in countless ways, as actual children.
The phrase 'child prostitute' was also bandied about as though children choose to have sex with much older men for money, drugs or a box of fried chicken.
As we digest Baroness Casey's 200-page report on the scandal, published this afternoon, there is unlikely to be much in it we don't already know (although many have basically chosen not to know it, or, indeed, act upon it).
I knew about the pimping of children in care in the 1980s because I worked in children's homes/residential units. Reporting the same girls missing, night after night, became pointless as the police did nothing. The girls would tell their gullible social workers that their pimps were their lovely boyfriends. So many blind eyes were turned, I found it impossible. Unforgivably, those working in the system seemed to accept it as inevitable. My experience in London then was not with Asian gangs, but I saw how little value these children's lives had.
But the problem in some cities was not just that these children were treated as not worth saving. Their voices were not centred because what they were telling us was too difficult: that they were being abused by gangs of men of Pakistani and Kashmiri descent.
So, thank god for journalists like the late Andrew Norfolk and Julie Bindel who would not let this story go. Thank god for Maggie Oliver, a former detective with Greater Manchester Police and a whistleblower on the sex abuse ring in Rochdale. Thank god for the Muslim women who have spoken out, because we have to ask what these men, who injected children with heroin, sodomised, burnt and even branded them, do to their 'own' women.
'Progressives' who ran several of the councils involved are clueless about safeguarding. We have seen it around the trans issue, where any notion of safeguarding of children or vulnerable women has gone out of the window. Not all trans people are predatory, we are told. Well, of course not, but a few are.
Not all Pakistani men are sex abusers. Again, of course not. But some are. Yet, Labour politicians continue to allege 'racism'. Only in January, Sir Keir Starmer said those supporting a national grooming gang inquiry were 'jumping on the bandwagon of the far-Right'. Last month, Lucy Powell, Leader of the Commons, accused a political commentator of 'dog whistle' politics when he brought up the subject on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions?
How can the organised sexual exploitation of children over two decades, exploitation that is still going on, be dismissed as a dog whistle? What kind of denial is this? What a pathetic set of excuses have been trotted out: white men abuse too, so ethnicity is not a factor. Or 'community relations' must be protected at all costs so throw these white trash girls under a bus. No one cares about them anyway.
Baroness Casey has not backed away from any of this or the fact that asylum seekers may be sex offenders. Those who knew what was going on but suppressed the information, considering it too incendiary, did so by failing to record the perpetrators' ethnicity.
One of the problems now is that, following the Jay Report into Child Sexual Abuse in 2014, many of those involved just stepped down. In Yorkshire, the council's Director of Children's Services and the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire resigned. Remember that the prevalent attitude deemed the girls 'undesirables' unworthy of police protection. Nothing has happened to such people. Meanwhile, some of the girls have been sent to prison for soliciting.
The national inquiry that Starmer has now agreed to, after rejecting the idea multiple times, can compel witnesses to attend but could take months to set up and go on for years, like the Grenfell inquiry. And, unless its recommendations are acted upon, could serve as nothing but symbolic flagellation. What is needed is accountability which is why some are pushing for criminal investigations. Yes. We are surely talking about the criminal and institutional neglect of vulnerable children.
The fear is that speaking the truth about what we have known for decades will spark anti-immigrant feeling. In response, I ask: 'Has ignoring the reality brought about community cohesion?' People talk. What is going on in Bradford? We have all heard the rumours. To ignore what has happened to these girls because it is politically inconvenient is to further use them, rather than seeing them as human beings. It is to be complicit in this shameful episode. That complicity must end.
