The UK’s left-wing-led government responds to weeks of fury expressed by the wider public triggered by growing awareness of the horrors of the child rape grooming gangs with promises of new inquiries, but critics say the moves amount to little more than a cover up or whitewash.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, a Labour veteran who served in the previous government of Tony Blair in the early 2000s, addressed Parliament on Thursday afternoon to announce five government-funded local inquiries into child rape grooming gangs in English towns. In language that would have been unthinkable for a senior Labour politician just months ago, Cooper acknowledged an ethnic element in the rape gangs and she spoke of Pakistani-heritage abusers.
Cooper said she would order the collection of better ethnicity data in future and read out statistics collected by the Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce on the known scale of the problem. Caveating that the figures were certainly an “significant underestimate” given “the vast majority of abuse goes unreported”, she stated in 2013 there were 770 “reported cases of group or gang-related child sexual exploitation”.
The Home Secretary said presently there are “127 major police investigations underway on child sexual exploitation and gang grooming across 29 different police force” and that “Many major investigations have involved Pakistani-heritage gangs”. She told Parliament:
…the data on ethnicity of both perpetrators and victims is still inadequate. As I’ve said last week we will overhaul the data we expect local areas to collect as part of a new performance management framework. But I have also asked the Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce to immediately expand the ethnicity data is collects and publishes, gathering data from the end of the investigation when a fuller picture is available, not just the beginning when suspects may not yet have been identified.
“But in order to go much further I have asked baroness Louise Casey to oversee a rapid audit of the current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country and to make recommendations on the further work that is needed.
Cooper insisted local inquiries, rather than a national inquiry that many have called for in recent weeks, would be “effective” and “can delve into far more local detail and deliver more locally relevant answers and change”. A national inquiry would be “lengthy”, she said.
The announcement comes just a week after Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer declared those wanting more focus on grooming gangs were playing into “far-right” narratives, yet the announcement may not be the U-turn it first seems. I had already been the Labour position that it would allow more local inquiries, while rejecting the joined-up national inquiry campaigners say is really needed.
This is important, they say, for several reasons. Perhaps chief among them is the ability of a national, central government inquiry to summon witnesses and compel them to testify: the local inquiries rely on people volunteering their testimony. On the other hand, the emergence of grooming gangs across the United Kingdom with similar modus operandi and apparent capacity to corrupt local government and law enforcement simultaneously, with girls often trafficked between different towns to customers, at least suggests a wider criminal conspiracy and child rape gangs learning from each other.
Without a national inquiry, critics say, the collection of siloed local investigations will never have the chance to look at the bigger picture and really figure out how deep the rot goes.
Investigative journalist Charlie Peters, who is emerging as a respected voice on grooming gangs, highlighted abuse survivors who reacted with despair to the Labour government’s announcement on Thursday. Sarah Wilson, a Rotherham rape gang survivor who was raped in a playground aged 11 before rape by older Pakistani men became “a standard part of her life”, and whose sister was murdered in the town, replied to the Home Secretary’s announcements: “It’s a national inquiry we need not a local one”.
Wilson, whose mother was told by police she had made a “lifestyle choice”, said today it is important to investigate not just the perpetrators but “the people in authority” given efforts to “cover up how big this scandal is”.
Another Rotherham survivor who goes by the pseudonym Elizabeth Harper, who was raped daily for four years as a child and who has previously asserted that South Yorkshire Police victimised her parents when they tried to report her disappearances, called the Home Secretary’s announcement “the cover up of the cover up”. She said: “It’s not adequate at all, shows no transparency- shows no statutory footing, so they can’t compel witnesses… [the government needs to] join the dots up and show the level of organised crime that’s within this country, but to also identify the patterns of those that fail children”.
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