The grooming-gangs scandal is a stain on the British state
MOHAMMED ZAHID ran a clothes stall in Rochdale market, and a grooming gang. He employed vulnerable girls, offering them gifts of alcohol and underwear, and targeted others when they came to buy tights for school. Along with his friends, who included other Pakistan-born stallholders and taxi drivers, Mr Zahid then treated the children as sex slaves, raping and abusing them in shops, warehouses and on nearby moors. Among his victims were two 13-year-old girls. One was in care; both were known to social services and the police. On June 13th, almost 25 years after the abuse began, Mr Zahid and six others were convicted of 30 counts of rape.
Britain's grooming-gangs scandal, the long-ignored group-based sexual abuse of children, has been a stain on the country for decades. Yet justice for victims and action to tackle failures have been painfully slow. On June 16th the government published an audit, which pinned the blame on authorities failing to see 'girls as girls' and having 'shied away from' looking into crimes committed by minorities—in this case often men of Asian or Muslim (especially Pakistani) heritage. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, announced a raft of measures including new criminal investigations. At last, the government is getting to grips with a scandal that should remain a case study of institutional failure.
The latest report follows a succession of probes stretching back over a decade. Those include two long public inquiries, one completed in 2015 into gangs in Rotherham, another in 2022 into child-sexual exploitation more broadly. Despite taking just four months, this audit provided new valuable insights for two reasons. It was the first to look solely at grooming gangs nationally. And it was led by Louise Casey, a cross-bench peer and social-policy fixer with a reputation for plain speaking.
Lady Casey begins by observing that, even now, it is impossible to know the scale of this problem. That is in part because these are horribly complex cases, victims fear coming forward and investigations were badly botched. Police forces failed to collect data. Grooming gangs have been identified in dozens of towns and cities. In Rotherham alone, thanks to an unusually thorough police investigation led by the National Crime Agency (NCA), 1,100 victims were identified. Our rough calculation suggests that tens of thousands of victims could be awaiting justice.
Lady Casey's most significant contribution is on the role of ethnicity. It was known that some police forces failed to look into reports of Asian grooming gangs out of a fear of appearing racist or upsetting community relations. She goes beyond this, strongly criticising a Home Office report from 2020, which claimed in spite of very poor data that levels of group-based child-sexual exploitation were likely to be in line with the general population, with 'the majority of offenders being White'. No such conclusions can be drawn, she says. Instead she cites new, more solid data, unearthed from three police forces, showing that suspects were disproportionately of Asian heritage; in Greater Manchester, more than half were.
Will this time be different?
There is no evidence to support the idea, found on the right, that Asian men are more likely to commit sexual or child-sexual abuse in general. Yet the refusal of some on the left to grapple with the role of culture and ethnicity in group-based abuse was inexcusable. What marks these crimes out, says Sunder Katwala of British Future, a think-tank, is precisely that perpetrators become disinhibited from moral norms as a group. Asian men appeared to target white girls because they were from another community. Cultural over-sensitivity may also have blinded the police to obvious patterns, like the role of (disproportionately Asian) taxi drivers employed by councils to ferry vulnerable children.
Lady Casey also shines a light on sexism and classism running through the state. Presented with evidence of predatory gangs, the police's reaction was often to treat victims as 'wayward teenagers' or adults who had made bad choices. Many were not believed—some were even criminalised as child prostitutes. Ms Cooper will change the law to prevent rapists getting away with lesser charges by claiming that 13-15 year-olds had 'consented' to sex.
The home secretary also, sensibly, announced that the NCA would take over hundreds of cold cases. Attention, however, focused on her reversal in calling another public inquiry. Such inquiries have become something of a national addiction, often less fact-finding probes than expensive and cumbersome attempts at catharsis. In this case one seems warranted: earlier inquiries have left basic gaps, and statutory powers could be used to compel local police forces and councils to release documents, as happened in Rotherham.
Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader who had called for such a U-turn, reacted gleefully, accusing the government of having attempted a cover-up. That trivialises the depth and breadth of the failure, which successive politicians in Westminster have overlooked (the home secretary at the time of the 2020 report was Priti Patel, a Conservative). But many recommendations from previous inquiries covering issues from data sharing to victim support have not been implemented, owing to a lack of political interest and bureaucratic inertia. This time, the hope must be that attention is sustained, and many more predators like Mr Zahid end up behind bars.
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