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New Statesman
22-06-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Grooming gangs, social cohesion and hard truths
Getty Images Trust in the institutions that are meant to protect us is built slowly but shattered quickly. Over the past decade, report after report has revealed the same shocking story: that thousands of vulnerable girls were groomed and abused by gangs while the institutions charged with their safety looked the other way. Baroness Casey's investigation, which prompted the PM's U-turn on a new statutory inquiry, is just the latest in a series of findings that lay bare the scale of that betrayal. She describes a 'collective failure' on the part of the British state. Victims were failed not once but repeatedly. This sustained failure by governments and authorities to confront the problem failed victims first and foremost, but the consequences have reverberated across society. Part of the responsibility for that failure must lie with a culture that chose to prioritise social cohesion and community relations over justice for victims and punishment of perpetrators. Social cohesion is something we should all care about – society cannot function without it – trust in neighbours, communities and government is the backbone of a civilised society and last summer's unrest was a stark reminder of how fragile social cohesion can be, and how quickly it can unravel. But community relations should never have been a rationale to prevent proper investigation of the gangs – and the refusal to tackle the issues that enabled grooming, with clarity and honesty, should also provide a stark warning that in fact community cohesion can only be preserved by confronting uncomfortable truths head-on, however difficult that may seem. Going back to August 2014, the Jay Report revealed not only the extent of abuse in Rotherham but also highlighted a critical missed opportunity: the failure of authorities to work openly and honestly with the communities involved. Professor Alexis Jay noted in her report that 'throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue.' Had the authorities acknowledged who was perpetrating these crimes and engaged with the communities concerned openly and frankly, the vast majority of whom were as horrified by the actions of some Pakistani men as everyone else, we might have built stronger communities rather than fracturing them. After all, what could be more corrosive to public trust than either deliberate obfuscation or wilful ignorance in tackling one of the most universally condemned crimes imaginable, an approach that was at least partly motivated by avoiding hard truths about the preponderance of offenders from a particular community. In focus groups where the gangs operated this sense of anger and mistrust is palpable. People speak with deep frustration about how vulnerable working-class girls from their communities were ignored, dismissed, or 'adultified' by those meant to protect them. For some, this confirmed the belief that their communities simply didn't matter to the authorities – and perpetrators did. And when these concerns are dismissed as politically motivated or shut down in the name of political correctness, they don't go away. Resentment doesn't fade when it's ignored. It festers. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This breakdown of trust doesn't stop there. Valid concerns, left unaddressed, feed real conspiracy theories. It allows the conversation to be dominated by those who want to use it to sow division, as Louise Casey herself says the alternative with 'the racists is giving them more ammunition'. In the long term, attempts to avoid confronting issues to prevent inflaming community tensions are toxic to the very cohesion they aim to protect. The task now for the Government is to rebuild trust. Time will tell whether the measures announced by the Home Secretary help to do this, but it is a crucial first step that the failures of the British state and the underlying factors are being discussed openly in Parliament. The Government's challenge is convincing the public that truth and justice will be fully pursued, and that nothing like this can happen again. In practice, this must also mean putting an end to a type of politics that dismisses real concerns because we don't 'trust the motives' of those raising them. Most of those campaigning on grooming gangs have done so out of genuine concern for the victims and justice; others have done so for political or prejudiced reasons – but ultimately the Government should have been guided by doing what was right for victims and their communities – regardless of whether they agreed with some of where the calls came from. The challenge for other politicians is to avoid reducing this into an opportunity for political point-scoring. For the public this isn't about one party or another – and our polling makes abundantly clear they see this as failure shared across successive governments. The truth is an end in itself, and above all, we owe it to the victims to, as Casey puts it, 'grasp this as a society.' But beyond justice for the victims, we should take from this a lesson that social trust depends on pursuing the truth, no matter how much it hurts or what we might find. Bad things grow in the dark , and sunlight is an incredibly effective disinfectant. The darker the issue, the more sunlight is needed. [See also: Keir Starmer's grooming gang cowardice] Related
India Today
16-06-2025
- Politics
- India Today
UK orders enquiry into child sex abuse by Pak-origin 'grooming' gangs after audit
The United Kingdom has announced a national enquiry into group-based child sexual exploitation following a scathing audit that revealed consistent failures in addressing the role of some Pakistani-heritage men in grooming and sexually abusing young white Home Secretary Yvette Cooper updated Parliament on Monday on the findings of the 'National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse' led by Baroness Louise audit, which examined cases from three police forces, found a significant over-representation of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men among suspects. It also criticised institutions for avoiding discussions about ethnicity for fear of being seen as racist or stoking community tensions. Cooper stressed that such silence has only fuelled misunderstanding and allowed harmful narratives to fester. Quoting the audit, Cooper said, "In the local data that the audit identified clear evidence of over-representation amongst suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage, and she refers to examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions."Cooper assured that the vast majority of British Asian and Pakistani-heritage communities are "appalled" by such crimes and agreed that offenders must face strict legal consequences. She also promised an "unequivocal apology" to victims and announced that rape laws would be tightened. Additionally, many girls previously convicted of child prostitution would be enquiry will address decades of systemic failures, which Cooper attributed to "blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions".The move comes after Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the weekend pledged to implement all 12 recommendations made by Baroness Casey, including the national 197-page report described the term "group-based child sexual exploitation" as a sanitised phrase for crimes involving "multiple sexual assaults committed against children by multiple men on multiple occasions". It detailed severe abuse, including forced abortions, sexually transmitted infections and children taken from victims at report called for accurate recording of perpetrator's ethnicity and for authorities to treat all exploited minors as children first, not delinquents or issue re-entered public discourse earlier this year after Tesla CEO Elon Musk criticised the UK government's handling of past scandals involving grooming gangs. The audit was launched soon after and has since questioned long-standing narratives about the ethnicity of perpetrators, stating that the idea of an overwhelmingly white offender profile 'can't be proved' and that such assumptions have only caused further harm.
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Grooming gangs scandal: Damning key findings from the Casey review
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced details in the Commons of the review by Dame Louise Casey into Britain's grooming gangs scandal. She stressed the 'damning' findings were a 'stain on society' in the UK with appalling cases of abuse in a string of towns including Rochdale, Oldham, Rotherham and Oxford . The key findings include: * Children need to be treated as children * Too many grooming cases have been dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges because 13 to 15-year-olds were perceived to have been 'in love with or consented to sex' with the perpetrators * The law should be changed so adult men who groom and have sex with 13–15-yearolds received mandatory charges of rape * In three police force areas, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire, where high-profile cases involving Pakistani-heritage men have long been investigated and reported, the suspects of 'group based child sexual offences were disproportionately likely to be Asian men' * 'Ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities'. * In a dozen live, complex, group-based child sexual exploitation police operations, a significant proportion of these cases appear to involve suspects who are non-UK nationals and/or who are claiming asylum in the UK * Two thirds of overall cases had no ethnicity data recorded. The Government should make mandatory the collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases * Grooming gang prosecutions and investigations had also been identified where the alleged perpetrators are White British, European, African and Middle Eastern * There is 'continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling' among local agencies on grooming gangs * Further local investigation are needed but they should be overseen by a national commission with statutory inquiry powers * A national criminal operation is needed to catch more grooming gang paedophiles, which will be overseen by the National Crime Agency * With taxi drivers using their vehicles to target vulnerable teenagers, the Department for Transport should take immediate action to put a stop to 'out of area taxis' and bring in more rigorous statutory standards for local authority licensing and regulation of taxi drivers. * Around 500,000 children a year are likely to experience child sexual abuse (of any kind). * However, for the vast majority, their abuse is not identified, and it is not reported to the police either at the time or later * Police recorded crime data shows just over 100,000 offences of child sexual abuse and exploitation recorded in 2024, with around 60% of these being contact offences (and the remainder online offences) * Of these contact offences, an estimated 17,100 are 'flagged' by police as child sexual exploitation in police recorded crime data * The only figure on group-based child sexual exploitation comes from a new police dataset (called the Complex and Organised Child Abuse 7 Dataset - COCAD) which, while suffering a number of limitations, has identified around 700 recorded offences of group-based child sexual exploitation in 2023. * National police data confirms that the majority of victims of child sexual exploitation are girls (78% in 2023) with the most common age for victims being between 10 and 15 years old (57% in 2023). * Most perpetrators are men (76% in 2023). The data suggests that the age profile of perpetrators varies, with 39% of suspects aged 10 to 15 and 18% aged 18 to 29. This younger age profile is likely to be resulting from an increase in reporting of online and child-on-child offending
Time of India
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
BBC partly upholds complaint by British Sikh group over ‘Asian grooming gangs' interview
The Network of Sikh Organisations (NSO) has had a complaint it made to the BBC about a Radio 4 programme on Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs partly upheld. The NSO wrote to the BBC to complain about "various inaccuracies and deflection" in the broadcast on 12 Jan involving an interview with Nazir Afzal about "Asian grooming gangs" in Britain after they garnered renewed publicity following interventions by Elon Musk. The presenter, Edward Stourton, confronted Afzal, who was chief prosecutor at the time of the grooming gangs epidemic, with complaints by Hindus and Sikh groups regarding the term "Asian grooming gangs" which they said tarred all British Asians with the same brush and instead wanted the term "Pakistani heritage" used. Stourton alleged the word Asian was "misleading." Afzal responded: "I've got no problem with what you call it, but I think the Hindu community and the Sikh community need to have a look at themselves as well. Just two years ago Sikh Women's Aid (SWA), which is the main body run by women to protect women who are suffering abuse within the Sikh community, published their report on abuse within the Sikh community and, could you believe it, it was really really bad; so bad actually that they didn't want to put their name to it. They reached out to me and said, Nazir, would you do the foreword for our report? I said, why are you asking a British Muslim man to do the report? They said, firstly, if we put our names to it they are going to come for us, and secondly we couldn't find a Sikh man that would put his name to it." The NSO, in its complaint, said: "It is simply not true the authors did not want to put their name to the report, they did. Second, when Mr Afzal says that no Sikh man would put their name to the same report – again this is simply not true – there were three." The BBC executive complaints unit, in its published response, has admitted that three Sikh men had put their name to the report, but it did not uphold the complaint about the authors of the SWA report, saying their motive in contacting Afzal was contested. NSO in its complaint had also questioned why SWA, which focuses on domestic violence against women and girls within the Sikh community, was conflated with a debate on group-based child sexual exploitation perpetrated by majority Pakistani Muslim men on Radio 4 and why the presenter did not challenge this. "The presenter should have also been informed of the fact that both Hindu and Sikh communities have also fallen victim of 'grooming gangs' too. The BBC have made a documentary on the issue of British Sikh girls being targeted," the NSO wrote. The BBC failed to address these aspects of the complaint. Hardeep Singh, deputy director of the NSO, told TOI: "We will likely escalate the matter to Ofcom as the BBC correction only addresses part of our original complaint." Get the latest lifestyle updates on Times of India, along with Brother's Day wishes , messages and quotes !
Telegraph
01-05-2025
- Telegraph
Labour still doesn't know how to fight grooming gangs
For fear of rocking the multicultural boat, last night's harrowing Channel 4 documentary Groomed may not elicit the kind of establishment support received by Netflix TV series Adolescence – but it has reinforced my view that a national statutory inquiry into the nationwide scourge of grooming gangs is needed. Anna Hall's hard-hitting exposé reveals the gross institutional failures to protect some of the most vulnerable members of our society – school-aged girls, many of whom are in care and targeted at their under-regulated children's homes, falling prey to predatory male networks who coerced, intimidated, abducted, raped, and tortured them. Often, these networks demonstrated the toxicity of biraderi-style clannishness which can be found in Britain's Pakistani-heritage population – multi-generational family enterprises in tight-knit communities with high rates of occupation in the so-called 'night-time economy.' In some cases, victims were ferried around parts of England as gangs of men took turns on them in flats and apartments – subjecting them to forms of sexual brutality and torment which wouldn't be out of place on the history pages of Bangladesh's 1971 struggle for independence from what is now current-day Pakistan. While known to some who are familiar with street-based grooming – formally known as group-localised child sexual exploitation (GLCSE) – some viewers of Groomed would have been taken aback by the victim-blaming culture which has taken root in public institutions that have a duty to protect. One example highlighted in the documentary is the following: 'Chantelle…was misusing cannabis and alcohol…placing herself at risk of sexual exploitation' – a jaw-dropping sentence to find in a council's case summary about a child in its foster care system. Then there's this one, from an assessment record by children's services on the subject of 14-year-old Erin (not her actual name). 'Erin…is being exploited into prostitution. She hangs around with a number of men who take her money. She is a very promiscuous girl.' This is not simply about dereliction of duty – it exposes a dark culture which, appallingly, holds vulnerable children responsible for their own misery and suffering at the hands of organised networks of child sexual exploitation. Irrespective of the findings of Baroness Louise Casey's rapid national audit into the cultural and societal characteristics associated with group-based sexual exploitation of children, the current framework put in place by the current Labour Government – which includes a paltry pot of £5 million for 'locally-led work' into investigating the matter – is wholly insufficient. Not only is it peanuts, the risk of local institutions – all too often eager to protect their own reputations – marking their own homework shouldn't be underestimated. Foxes guarding the henhouse springs to mind. What is needed is a comprehensive independent investigation with the statutory powers to compel witnesses to attend and take evidence under oath. Considering the rot is so deep, with various organs of the British state implicated – police forces, local councils, social services, safeguarding teams, even state schools – perhaps it would be best for a non-British judge from the Anglosphere to preside over a statutory inquiry into GLCSE (with an international panel of experts). In the words of Labour peer Lord Glasman: 'the decades-long abuse of young girls and its cover-up is a sickness that must be exorcised from the body politic.' A national statutory inquiry focused on determining public-sector accountability would go some way towards this. With cross-party demands for a national statutory inquiry into the grooming gangs now gathering pace, one can only hope that Groomed – where the bravery of survivors and the courage of whistleblowers must be saluted – will spur on the Labour leadership to grow a backbone and commit to one. But considering it is a political party largely in thrall to multicultural ideology and emotionally disconnected from the white-British working classes, I won't be holding my breath.
