Why we must accept ethnicity matters in child grooming cases

A 24th man has just been charged with the rape of a 13-year-old girl more than ten years ago in Bradford. Twenty-four men. One 13-year-old girl. It takes some absorbing.

The case will come to trial in due course, but it prompts reflection on other cases of historic sexual abuse against girls where the victims have been white, working-class, usually in care and very young. One girl admitted her first memory was of sexual abuse aged five. The perpetrators have often been men from the British Pakistani community living under a Labour-run council. It all happened a decade or more ago. Nothing to see here, we are told. Just some unsavoury historic sex crime. Let’s all move along.

Harvey Weinstein’s abuse of women also went back years. That did not stop the #MeToo movement taking to the streets in outrage. Where is the outrage here?

No one marches for these girls, despite them numbering in their thousands, despite them being doused in petrol, threatened with knives and guns, injected with drugs, gang-raped at a tender age and even murdered – the fate suffered by 16-year-old Lucy Lowe. Outrage nowadays is so picky. Victim and perpetrator are the wrong class and race. Nothing white or privileged about Lucy’s 26-year-old taxi driver ‘boyfriend’, Azhar Ali Mehmood, later jailed for burning to death Lucy (who was then pregnant with his child), her sister and her mother.

No one is arguing that Pakistani men have a monopoly on child sex exploitation. The Catholic Church and Jimmy Savile spring to mind, not to mention all the hideous online abusers. But is the grooming epidemic as safely in the past as the authorities would have us believe? And how can we tell, if we shy away from the reasons behind it?

The role of the authorities, then and now, is almost as alarming as the grooming gangs themselves. Councils and the police, paralysed by political correctness and identity politics, failed spectacularly to protect the young children in their care – and all for fear of damaging community relations. I would say community relations have been damaged almost as much by the cover-up as by the original abuse – and continue to be so.

Sarah Champion, MP for Rotherham, recalled that social workers trying to report a crime were sent on race relations courses and threatened with disciplinary action ‘if they didn’t remove the fact they were identifying the person as a Pakistani male’.

Tom Crowther QC, who chaired the Telford inquiry, blames this on ‘nervousness about race’. It must be catching, because his own report into grooming gangs displays a similar timidity. Perpetrators are men of ‘southern Asian heritage’. Eight countries make up south Asia. How many Sri Lankans, Bhutanese or Indians live in Rotherham, Oldham or Huddersfield – let alone prey on 14-year-old girls? Gang rape, said one young victim, was a normal part of growing up in Rotherham. And that is not the fault of the Bhutanese.

So does euphemism and timidity indicate that all this is not quite as historic as the authorities would have us believe? The clue is in data collection. As recently as December 2019, the police force at the centre of the Rotherham grooming scandal was still not routinely recording the ethnicity of child sexual abuse suspects, according to the Times. In a town where hundreds of young girls were abused by men from one ethnic group, the police omitted suspect ethnicity in 67 per cent of the cases.

This lack of data is crucial – and the more cynical might claim that it must be deliberate. That helps explain the surreal conclusions of a recent Home Office report. Ignoring the group trials involving scores of men of Pakistani heritage, it claimed there is no credible evidence that any one ethnic group is over-represented in cases of child sexual exploitation. Indeed the report says ‘research has found that group-based offenders are most commonly white’. An opinion piece in the Guardian exclaims with obvious relief: ‘A powerful modern racial myth has been exploded.’ The crimes committed in ‘Rochdale, Oxford and Telford were real: but racist stereotyping and demonisation deflected from that’. In the report’s introduction, Priti Patel, the then home secretary, advocated better data collection, ‘including in relation to… ethnicity’. ‘This,’ sniffed the Guardian authors, ‘looks like a last-ditch attempt to keep a politically useful trope alive.’

However, findings from a report by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), published this year, tell a different story. Children are still being sexually exploited by grooming gangs in all parts of England and Wales in the ‘most degrading and destructive ways’. Any idea that abuse has fallen since the high--profile cases in Rotherham and Rochdale was ‘flawed’. It reported ‘extensive failures’ by councils and police and also highlighted that all-important lack of data on the ethnicity. ‘It is unclear whether a misplaced sense of political correctness or the sheer complexity of the problem have inhibited good-quality data collection.’

But at least it means the authors of the Guardian piece can sit back and blame the whole sorry story on those acceptable and reassuring baddies, ‘patriarchy, power and exploitation’. Sadly, while that happens, it means that little will be done to help the next generation of vulnerable young girls.