Reviewing 22 years of talking and writing about street grooming

We need a public enquiry, not to indulge loud politicians who've just discovered the issue but to ask how the British state failed thousands of vulnerable girls, many in its care

Given that over the last 15 years I’ve written a fair number of articles and posts about what get called 'grooming gangs’, I’ve tried to bring them all together in one place. I do think we need a national public inquiry to look at why it was that public authorities and the individuals that lead them so comprehensively failed young girls across England’s towns and cities. Not so self-serving politicians can shout about ‘muslim rape gangs’ and call for mass deportations but in order to try and get it so, in the future, the choices being made by leaders in the police, courts and social services serve the interests of vulnerable girls rather better.

I’m going to start with a blog post I wrote back in January 2011. Bear in mind that, as a sitting councillor in Bradford back then, I exercised a degree of circumspection perhaps not needed by those free from such positions of responsibility. The post is entitled “Wives or Whores? Thoughts on ‘grooming’:

“At the heart of all this isn’t race or religion but attitudes to women and especially the view that women fall into two categories – wives or whores. This is an attitude common among young Asian men but we are kidding ourselves if we think the cultural problem is wholly imported or even restricted to Pakistanis. What doesn’t help is that when someone says to the Asian community in Derby or Keighley that they have a problem, the first response of that community's representatives is denial – usually followed by allegations of racism or of “fuelling the BNP”.

The problem is that these cases do seem to involve a disproportionate number of young Asians – so either the police are letting white, afro-caribbean or mixed race gangs off the hook or else it really is a type of crime associated with young Asian men. And an exploitative, cruel and oppressive attitude to women – seeing girls as sex toys – sits at the heart of the problem.

For many of us - including plenty of Pakistani men - adopting such an attitude would result in short shrift but in all communities there are men passing on the evil doctrine that women are mere chattels fit only for making babies, feeding men and cleaning house – unless they’re whores when they just provide sex.”

I still think this summation is central to the issue, to why young (and not so young) Pakistani men groom, drug and rape vulnerable young women - girls. But there’s another concern, the reason why the choices and attitudes of social workers - the culture and ideology of social work - make it easier for these exploiting men to target, groom and rape teenage girls:

“The problem isn't simply bureaucracy - that is just a reflection of the problem. The real concern is the ideology of social work, the faux non-judgemental approach, the obsession with 'cultural sensitivities' and the view (unsupported by evidence) that there are no demographic or social factors that influence child abuse or neglect. This isn't true and social workers - as well as the ideologues who define social work practice - know it isn't true.

Like so many areas ruled by experts, social work (and the parasitic growths of lawyers and such that attach to the business) has become impenetrable - the verbiage of the profession excludes anyone seeking to understand, the sophistry of the professionals' defence is iron clad in its certainty and the elimination of challenge is now so sophisticated that it is impossible for us charged with being "corporate parents" to exercise that role in any way beyond the guided tweeness allowed by social workers.”

This was written in the context of the Daniel Pelka case in Warwickshire but the references to ‘non-judgementalism’ and ‘cultural sensitivities’ apply equally to the response from police and social services to grooming cases. In 2014 we saw the first substantive report (other than the records of court cases) to look at street grooming, the Jay Report inquiring into “child sexual exploitation” in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. Although some still try to suggest that (despite subsequent reports from Rochdale and Telford with very similar stories) Rotherham was uniquely egregious, the report described what happened:

“In just over a third of cases, children affected by sexual exploitation were previously known to services because of child protection and neglect. It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.”

Other than a sort of numbing shock at the stories, I was struck by that first sentence above - over a third of the girls were known to those responsible for child protection (schools, social services, health authorities and the police) and those authorities failed to protect them. So in August 2014 I suggested we need a national public enquiry - not sure if I was the first to do this but I was certainly one of the first:

“But this form of abuse - targeting girls and young women, plying them with drink and drugs and then sharing the victims round like playthings - has been all too frequent among Pakistani communities. Not just among young men captivated by gangster culture but, just as with other child abuse in the wider community, among otherwise respectable men in their 30s and 40s.

I'm reluctant to call for enquiries - most often they serve either to push the issue into the fog of the future or else to provide a platform for the worst sort of human rights lawyers to make a load of cash. But, given the number of similar cases from right across the country, it would seem worth considering whether an enquiry would help both the professionals dealing with the problem and the Pakistani communities to develop a more effective response to these 'grooming' cases.”

One of the ways in which Pakistani communities might be helped is by developing a better approach to raising boys. In September 2014 is reported a conversation with a Pakistani man who made this observation:

“The man - around my age - observed that Pakistani families and especially Pakistani men have no idea how to discuss matters relating to sex and sexual relationships. There is no concept of the father taking sons aside to talk about sexual behaviour or even about 'the birds and bees' for that matter. Nor, beyond the bare teachings of Islam, is there any discussion about sexual mores in the madrassah or mosque.”

And, because Pakistani culture is riddled with misogyny (it isn’t a surprise, however, that young Pakistani men are big fans of Andrew Tate) the lack of moderate male voices around sexual behaviour helps create attitudes to women - the wives or whores idea I’d first talked about in 2011. In 2015 a Serious Case Review conducted by Oxfordshire County Council was published. It looked at the (by then concluded) grooming case in Oxford. I commented:

“So for perhaps as long as six years, social workers in Oxford simply allowed what was happening to carry on. The abuse was in front of their eyes but was not seen as a problem worth reporting to senior management. This may be true but it must raise serious questions about supervision, management and appraisal within Oxfordshire social services. And at the heart of this is a culture that - as the report makes clear - tolerated under age sex and seemed not to understand that, in UK law, having sex with a minor is always a crime.”

Again we saw this ideological obsession with not judging children’s behaviour. Social workers weren’t covering up the crimes but were simply content with the fact that girls, many in the Council’s care, were having sex with adult men. The culture and ideology of social work and child protection professionals is one of the big reasons why so little was done to stop the abuse of girls. Police, social workers and teachers just saw kids having sex and decided they shouldn’t judge them for these actions.

By 2020 we’d had a series of reports, serious case reviews and reviews as well as dozens of court cases involving abusers. The Greater Manchester Review of that year set out how the police had failed. The Manchester Evening News reported:

“After her (Victoria Agoglia) death a police investigation, Operation Augusta, was set up to see if there was a wider problem of child sexual exploitation in south Manchester. Officers managed to quickly identify a network of nearly 100 Asian men potentially involved in the abuse of scores of girls via takeaways in and around Rusholme, but the operation was shut down shortly afterwards due to resources, ‘rather than a sound understanding’ of whether lines of inquiry had been exhausted.

Barely any charges were made against the men identified by the operation. Eight of them later went on to commit serious sexual crimes, including the rape of a child, the rape of a young woman, sexual assault and sexual activity with a child.”

I again called for a national public enquiry that pulls together the evidence and asks those who made the choice not to intervene why they made that choice:

“Since this became clear, we have seen individual reports from each of these places, some more telling than others but all showing the same detachment as public authorities repeatedly ignored representation, dismissed exploited girls as 'making their own choices' or 'sexually aware', and hinted as other sensitivities contributing to the lack of action to protect the abused or deal with the abusers. Beyond these public reports there is a lot more information, detailed and granular evidence, hidden away in Serious Case Reviews and Court Files. Public authorities have used every trick in the book to avoid their failings being revealed - that the victims were mostly children means that these authorities feel able to hide behind the laws intended to protect young people, extending them to protect social workers, police officers and the CPS lawyers from proper scrutiny. Too many people responsible for failing to protect young girls from exploitation, abuse and rape have avoided being held to account.”

I first encountered street grooming of vulnerable girls way back in 2003 when, to her credit, Labour MP Anne Cryer had raised the issue publicly (accompanied by death threats from the gangs and opprobrium from the great and good who saw her comments as fuelling the ‘far right’). I was on Bradford Council’s Executive back then, we were briefed about the issue and, as people tend to do, took the assurances of our Director of Social Services and senior West Yorkshire Police officers at face value. So we focused on the politics not the plight of the girls - maybe the riots of 2001 were at the back of our minds but I think we got it wrong, especially given the Director of Social Services later told the press that she was aware of cases elsewhere. I reviewed my memory of those days in an article in 2023 concluding:

“In the end we failed thousands of vulnerable children. Nothing else should matter. The colour or religion of the criminals doesn’t matter, nor does the colour of religion of the girls. And by we, I include myself. But senior social workers, police officers, head teachers, health workers, heads of voluntary organisations, politicians and the media - all these people failed girls who had few chances in the first place and even fewer after we’d allowed men with drugs, vodka and that Andrew Tate slap to groom and force them into prostitution.

So just stop playing politics with these girls. Stop pretending that the perpetrators aren’t very often Pakistani men. And start doing something to sort the problem out. Above all, stop pretending that we didn’t know about the problem back then when we did, and admit we didn’t do enough to protect those girls. We need to shine the light of honest truth and openness on this sorry history. Not to, as the Tommy Robinson fans and assorted racists would like, to have a go at the Pakistani community or Muslims, those communities are also hurt by the failure of police and social services, but to hold to account those public servants and politicians who did too little, always too late.”

We do need a reckoning. Not just to get the satisfaction of putting some heads on poles but to try and understand how the non-judgemental culture and ideology of social services, fear of community backlash, and an abject terror of being called a racist acted to let down all those vulnerable girls, many in our care? As I said in an article about public accountability (or rather that lack of this accountability):

“One of the most significant and egregious failures of public accountability relates to multiple cases of exploitative child grooming and rape across England. The cases at Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford have all been subject to investigative reports that identified a catalogue of failures across the police, local authority social services departments, schools and health services. Various mealy-mouthed apologies have been issued but no actual people have been identified as those responsible for decisions or choices that led to the prostituting of exploited girls continuing despite authorities knowing about these activities. There is no real accountability.”