Street Grooming: Remembering Keighley

In 2003 Anne Cryer raised concerns about street grooming by groups of largely Pakistani men in the town. We are still waiting for some accountability from those who did too late to help those girls

The matter of so-called grooming gangs is back in the media because the government has announced a tough crackdown on the problem. Or rather that, in doing so, the Home Secretary has reminded us that street grooming - what the Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency call Type 1 offenders who target young people “on the basis of their vulnerability, rather than as a result of a specific preferential sexual interest in children” - is disproportionate associated with South Asian groups and especially men of Pakistani heritage.

Saying this has generated a predictable series of accusations about racism and a repeated reminder that most child sexual abuse is conducted by white people, unsurprising in a nation where nearly 90% of adults are white. At the same time there are accusations flying backwards and forwards with Labour politicians saying the government has been slow to act and therefore it is all the Tories fault while the Conservatives point at Labour councils and some choice quotes from Gordon Brown and Naz Shah (which may or may not be actual quotes).

None of this gets to the heart of the problem and it reminds me that, as I said recently while writing about public accountability, is a colossal public sector failure:

“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.”

Social services is an area where the role of politicians in decision-making is limited by both the law and by the view that we should defer to the specialists in cases relating to child protection. Politicians can’t overrule social services management any more than police and crime commissioners can overrule police officers. This doesn’t mean politicians can’t hold such decision-makers to account but it has meant that, in practice, politicians at local and national level haven’t done so.

To provide some context, let me recollect my experience of the earliest prominent grooming case in Keighley.

In the Bradford local elections of 2000, the Conservatives won a load of seats and, in something of a shock, found they were able to take on leading the Council. The Party held that leadership for the next ten years although they never enjoyed an overall majority relying on pacts, deals and bargains to govern. The Blairite changes keenly embraced by the Labour Party made this a little easier especially after Labour’s NEC told local parties they couldn’t do those deals and pacts.

I was a member of that Conservative administration from 2000 to 2006 (after which I headed to what I call Siberia but that is a different story). And I’m talking about riots and grooming gangs because these things matter to Bradford and are too filled with party politicking for us to get a grip on the scale of failure in public administration that it represents. My portfolio was regeneration which was fun but a painful business in a city that had major riots in 2001 and some of the worst metrics on employment, education and social cohesion in the country.

We’d been through the 2001 riots (and don’t belittle these, people died and more would have done but for the work of police, council officers and youth workers) and the pointless and pompous reports from assorted great and good dumped on us by the government. Herman Ouseley and Ted Cantle came and lectured us about how we’d all gone wrong without offering any route out from the problems they’d described.

Then in 2003 Anne Cryer, Labour MP for Keighley (full disclosure, I stood against her in 2001 as Conservative candidate) was approached by some mums in the town who talked about how Pakistani men are targeting and grooming their daughters. Anne took their concerns seriously and raised them with social services who (as it their wont) stalled, so she went to the press. And the issue, for that reason alone, arrives at what we called the CMT (‘corporate management team’ for those who care) where we are briefed about the problem.

The problem presented to us isn’t that girls in Keighley are being targeted by gangs of young men, plied with drink and drugs then used as prostitutes. No, the problem is that the girls are white and the men are of Pakistani heritage. We don’t even know at this point that half the girls are also in the Council’s care. The story builds, the Director of Social Services tells us that these grooming cases are not unique to Keighley and that they are working to deal with the problem. We relax when we’re also told that the police are working with senior social workers to respond. I’ll point out here that it was 2016 - thirteen years later - when some men are finally jailed for the grooming, exploitation and rape of the girls.

A year later and Channel 4 has done a documentary - ‘Edge of the City’ - looking at the work of social services in Keighley that, unsurprisingly, makes significant reference to the grooming cases and the issues raised by Anne Cryer. Then the leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, announced that this would be a party political broadcast for his racist dribble. This wouldn’t do at all, we mobilised and, backed by the Labour Home Secretary, Channel 4 was persuaded to hold off showing the documentary until after the 2004 local elections (in one of Blair’s more deranged decisions conducted as all postal elections) so as to prevent the BNP using is as a rallying point.

Despite the media silence about grooming, the BNP won nine seats (out of 90) in those elections, including four in Keighley - probably preventing the Conservative from taking overall control - and everything returned to a semblance of normality. But the grooming, exploitation and rape of teenaged girls continued. The quiet pressure to take action continued including some changes to the law - full credit to Anne Cryer here - and eventually we saw a shift in the attitude of social workers and police. In 2016 after a long investigation 12 Keighley men were found guilty of crimes relating to grooming. A sort of line was drawn under the events and, whenever people raised concerns about the persistence of grooming police and social services responded with an anonymised boilerplate response about how everything has changed and they are focused on responding to these crimes.

For my part I feel that we could - should - have asked more questions, have been less bothered by the politics of Anne Cryer's concerns and more concerned with the interests of the abused girls. But we heard - I was briefed as leader of the opposition - how the problems persisted, how special units were established and how it was hard to construct a case. But never did I hear how maybe we could have done things differently a decade earlier, have treated the girls as victims rather than streetwise prostitutes.

In a Guardian article from 2004 about the Keighley case we see, in the statement from West Yorkshire police, how they (and social services were often no different) saw the problem:

"In the case of alleged sexual exploitation of young women in Keighley, social services and the police have been conducting extensive enquiries for the last two years. A number of girls have been interviewed, aged mainly between 13 and 16. We have found no evidence of systematic exploitation. Some of the girls admitted having relationships with older men but they described them as their boyfriends and did not feel they were being exploited."

I remember a conversation with a senior police officer about the issues around the girls - or the ‘sorts of girl’ - involved in these cases. We’re talking about the 1990s here, the days when that dreadful apologia for street prostitution, Band of Gold, was on national TV. The programme acted like an advertisement for Bradford’s Lumb Lane red light area - you might have watched the series as just a slightly gritty TV show but plenty of men headed to Bradford thinking it was filled with street girls who looked like actresses. The officer told me that their view of the girls was that they were streetwise and knew what they were doing. They’d noticed a new set of Pakistani pimps but thought nothing of this given the city’s demographics.

The grooming of vulnerable girls and their entrapment into prostitution is not something that is peculiar to Pakistani communities. This sort of activity is as old as the demand for young girls from men. But it became, in a lot of places in England, a signature exploitation associated with that community. Partly fueled by boys being told that those white girls with their short skirts and tight tops are just tarts and whores, the exploitation of these women was profitable and, critically, focused to a large part on the most vulnerable. According to CEOP over half of the grooming gang victims are girls in local authority care.

Right back in 2003 the racist right wanted to make this a problem about Pakistanis. The BNP followed by Tommy Robinson and the rag tag of weirdos that peeled off from Nigel Farage’s assorted political efforts all took advantage of these grooming cases claiming that it was either some sort of obligation on Muslims or else that it represented the importing of a malign culture into Britain. It is neither of these things. Islam has the same view of prostitution as Christianity and the idea that exploited vulnerable teenagers are something to do with South Asian immigration is obviously written by people who’ve never read Oliver Twist (or for that matter Moll Flanders).

We’ve now arrived, 20 years after Anne Cryer first raised the issue, at another debate about grooming. But instead of us talking about the actual issue, what we see is a ridiculous party political game that is intended to tiptoe round the problems and concerns raised by reports into grooming in Rotherham and Rochdale as well as twenty or so high profile court cases. All of these reports and cases tell us that ‘Type I Sexual Abuse’ is disproportionately associated with Pakistani heritage men. Disproportionately doesn’t mean ‘all’, it means more than would be expected if perpetrators of these crimes were randomly distributed. Helpfully CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection) tells us that roughly 80% of child abuse cases involve white perpetrators but nearly 90% of Type I cases - the exploitation of vulnerable young people for sex - involve Pakistani men.

And we should remember this is about real girls, not just statistics. When I watch the current Home Secretary and the Shadow Home Secretary turning this problem into a party political spat I want to cry. Twenty years ago, party politics and a fear of the racists resulted in us paying more attention to that politics than the interests of the abused girls. I look back at how Anne Cryer and Sarah Champion were treated by their party for raising the issues of these exploited children (dare I say it but this is because of concerns about the votes exposing the truth might cost) and I consider that our politics is in a mess. At least 3,000 girls have been exploited this way in England’s towns and cities, there are thousands of vulnerable girls out there being targeted as we speak. Yet it is more important for commenters and politicians to play to the gallery, to call the other side racist and to pretend that enough was done to respond to the problem two decades ago.

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.