As Prime Minister Rishi Sunak set out plans for a police task force, he has said that victims of grooming gangs have been ignored because of political correctness. The government has said that specialist officers supported by the National Crime Agency will be sent to help forces with their investigation. And better ethnicity data will help ensure abusers do not evade justice due to "cultural sensitivities", it added.
When asked if the focus on British-Asian grooming gangs was appropriate, Prime Minister Sunak said, “All forms of child sexual exploitation carried out by whomever are horrific and wrong, but with the specific issue of grooming gangs we have had several independent inquiries look at the incidents here in Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford.
“What is clear is that when victims and other whistle-blowers came forward their complaints were often ignored by social workers, local politicians, or even the police. The reason they were ignored was due to cultural sensitivity and political correctness. That is not right.” He said the new measures would “make a big difference in helping us root out the evil perpetrated by grooming gangs”.
This was followed by comments from Home Secretary Suella Braverman in which she cited scandals, including Rotherham and Rochdale, as evidence that grooming gangs involved groups of men of mainly Pakistani ethnicity. Number 10 stressed the Government would take an “evidence-based” approach to tackle “all aspects” when challenged over Mrs Braverman’s comments singling out British Pakistani men.
Although previous Home Office research has failed to show Asian gangs were likely to groom, Mr Sunak said that was why it was vital that ethnic data was collected to guide police in their investigations, The Daily Telegraph reported.
Joining the dialogue, Labour Party Chief Sir Keir Starmer said, “I think the Government needs to be clear about the full extent of the challenge. “Ethnicity is not a reason not to come down hard, and it shouldn’t be. So, the Government is right about that. But on the other hand, the Government needs to recognise that that’s a small proportion of the cases we’re dealing with.”
He added: “If you look at the overall figure that is, you know, a relatively small element of it. That doesn’t mean it’s not to be dealt with, don’t get me wrong, but if we are not clear about the full picture, then we won’t have a proper response.
“I want a government that recognises the full response that’s needed here.”
London Mayor Sadiq Khan has said that the Prime Minister and Home Secretary need to look at evidence rather than using one ethnicity into some sort fo cultural war to try and win votes.He also mentioned that the evidence lies in the Home Office’s 2020 report itself that said that majority of cases of child sexual exploitation were from white men. According to him, the government needs to invest more in council services, social services.
Downing Street has denied using dog-whistle generalisations to launch a crackdown on grooming gangs after the NSPCC and experts warned that framing the issue as one based on ethnicity could hamper efforts to tackle it.
An independent inquiry found at least 1,400 children had been subjected to sexual abuse in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, with the perpetrators predominantly men of Pakistani heritage. The racial profile of these cases resulted in the issue becoming a cause-celebre within far-right politics. With this, the dialogue and investigation around ‘sex grooming’ have forever been moving in the same vicious circle for decades.
A Home Office report in 2020 on group-based child sexual exploitation found that the majority of offenders were young white men, and said it was not possible to conclude whether any particular ethnic group was disproportionately represented.
Sir Peter Wanless, the chief executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) said, “It’s also vital we remember that any child can be a victim of child sexual exploitation and adult perpetrators do not just come from one background. Sexual predators will target the most vulnerable and accessible children in society and there must be a focus on more than just race so we do not create new blindspots that prevent victims from being identified.”
Sabah Kaiser, former ethnic minority ambassador for the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse led by Alexis Jay, which reported last year, said it was “very, very dangerous for the government to turn child sexual abuse into a matter of colour”. She told Today Show: “It is really important that we do not turn this very, very important issue into an issue about colour. Because let’s be frank, let’s be serious: that grabs headlines, but that is not helpful for this topic.”
The psyche behind sex grooming
Dr Dinesh Bhugra CBE, professor of mental health and diversity at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London told Asian Voice, “Grooming is hideous activity and must be strongly condemned. People from all walks of life and groups do try and take advantage of vulnerable boys and girls for sexual and control purposes. We need accurate data on the numbers groomed by respective groups otherwise it is likely that further stereotyping and anti-Asian feelings and racism will exaggerate reactions against certain groups. It is important to look at the possibilities of vulnerabilities and educating people. Grooming is a social issue and society must tackle it as a matter of urgency and also for the wellbeing of those who have been or are being groomed. The key challenge is to ensure that those who groom vulnerable individuals are punished appropriately but a linked-up approach between education, employment, poverty, housing etc is crucial in dealing with this scourge. As a society, we have a moral obligation to see what makes people vulnerable and help develop their resilience.”
Drugs and alcohol were reportedly frequently used by grooming gangs to incapacitate girls or coerce them into sex, with the criminality later discouraging victims from going to the police.
There are several methods of grooming, with the best-known “boyfriend” model seeing an abusive relationship used to force victims into sex with others. Children can also be trafficked, befriended online or – in the so-called party – targeted by groups of men who lure them to gatherings with offers of drinks, drugs, money and car rides. According to The Independent, some sexual exploitation has been linked to criminal gangs, who also pay or force girls to run drugs or keep them in their homes. In high-profile cases such as Rotherham and Rochdale, perpetrators have been much older than their victims, but police say peer-on-peer abuse by teenagers from the same school or area is more common in some areas. Simon Bailey, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for child protection, said officers were “committed to doing all we can to pursue and prosecute criminals who exploit and abuse young people”.
Unconscious bias
According to a study from 2017, titled ‘What do we know about the ethnicity of people involved in sexual offences against children?’, Full Fact reported, “At first glance this would seem to suggest that the group identified as Asian are overrepresented (compared to the proportion of Asian people in the general population) but CEOP said that the data was too inconsistent to draw “national conclusions” from. It said more research was needed to see whether the results were affected by “unconscious bias” in child protection agencies, the demographics of local areas or if there were issues in the community that needed to be addressed.” (See P3 for more data)
Little information is available on the ethnicity of those convicted of sexual offences against children.
Further cementing the discrepancy and inaccuracy of data around sexual grooming, a paper titled ‘Cultures of Abuse: ‘Sex Grooming’, Organised Abuse and Race in Rochdale, UK’ by Michael Salter, Selda Dagistanli the University of Western Sydney, Australia, said, “There are important cultural and normative antecedents to sexual violence but these have been misrepresented in debates over organised abuse as racial issues and attributed to ethnic minority communities. In contrast, the colonialist trope promulgating the fictional figure of the rational European has resulted in the denial of the cultural and normative dimensions of organised abuse in ethnic majority communities by attributing sexual violence to aberrant and sexually deviant individuals whose behaviours transgress the boundaries of accepted cultural norms.”
Salter further concluded, “Fundamentally, the racialisation of organised abuse represents a limited way of addressing the issue. Even though the issue of culture has been key to bringing to light organised abuse by South Asian and Pakistani men, it narrows the focus of media and public attention and serves to conceal similar abuses by ‘white’ perpetrators. This creates room for speculation on whether the racialised publicity surrounding the Rochdale and other racialised child abuse cases is really driven by an interest to protect and redress the harms suffered by vulnerable young women and children. Locating the perversity of sexual exploitation in non-Western, non-white cultures enables issues unrelated to victim interests to be aired and justified in a public arena. In racialised cases of sexual abuse, these are normally politically sensitive issues around non-Western immigration and racially loaded debates about the acceptable boundaries of multiculturalism in Western cultures.”
Real problem brushed under the carpet
Lord Rami Ranger CBE told the newsweekly, “It is the duty of every Home Secretary to keep citizens safe and secure. The Rt Hon Suella Braverman MP is no different when she is expressing her concerns for the safety of young vulnerable girls. Their lives are equally important if not more.”
According to Lord Ranger, the Home Secretary has put the interest of the vulnerable girls above her popularity. “We can only root out such horrendous practices by bringing them under the spotlight without fear. It is not helpful to be politically correct when real lives are affected. We have to call a spade a spade. As they say, for evil to flourish all it takes is for good people to do nothing. As a result, it is the duty of every community leader to take steps to curb this scourge in our society where a particular community is committing out-of-proportion crimes against young and vulnerable girls,” he told us.
Lord Ranger further added, “Sadly, the prison records show that British Pakistani men have been targeting white girls for decades. I recall the former Home Secretary the Rt Hon Sajid Javid MP was also thinking of commissioning an enquiry into such practice. It shouldn’t be considered wrong to speak the truth in the UK. If people get offended by the truth then it is their shortcomings and an indictment of their own morality. How long can one sweep the real problem under the carpet out of fear of offending any community? The lives and future of our young generation must be paramount and not politically correct.”
Children suffer the unthinkable price
Ahead of the findings of a major inquiry, it’s clear we’re not even getting the basics right, Sonia Sodha an Observer columnist wrote in her column five months ago. “As long as we avert our gaze from sexual abuse, we will continue to fail children,” she wrote. According to her, the more time you spend looking at government policy, the more you realise how much of its intervention is recklessly short-term, ignores the evidence and attempts to fix the problem when it’s staring us in the face, rather than prevent it escalating.
She also mentioned in her OpEd that a conservative estimate is that 15% of girls and 5% of boys experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of 16 – half a million children every year. It’s as common as physical and emotional abuse, yet just a fraction of this abuse is picked up by the authorities: fewer than one in 10 children experiencing sexual abuse are assessed as at risk and just one in 200 is on a child protection plan for child sexual abuse. And it’s going in the wrong direction: the number of child protection plans for child sexual abuse has fallen significantly since the early 1990s, even as the total number of plans has rocketed.
Amid all political correctness, Sodha touched the right nerve by pressing that there is an urgent moral imperative to drop the myths about child sexual abuse that make adults more comfortable because it is children who suffer the unthinkable price.
