Definitive action needed on grooming scandal if a line is to be drawn underneath it - Jayne Dowle
A couple of years ago, I met a man who served as a police officer in Rotherham when the horror and scale of the grooming gangs first came to light.
He had taken early retirement, but remained haunted by accusations of being called ‘a racist’ because he had pointed out to colleagues, senior officers and other agencies the fact that the majority of the men abusing young girls in the South Yorkshire town were of Muslim Pakistani heritage.
“I’m not racist, not remotely,” he told me. “I was just speaking the truth.”
I thought about that retired police officer on Monday, as Sir Keir Starmer, director of public prosecutions when grooming gangs infected towns across the north of England, including Rotherham, went back on his previous conviction and told his government to announce a national enquiry.
I wonder if that retired police officer will be called to give evidence. I thought too about the peerless journalist Andrew Norfolk, who I once worked beside on a newsdesk.
Nothing in his quiet demeanour back then suggested he would go on to dedicate his life to exposing the perpetrators of rape, assault, drugging and worse, but Norfolk’s work, as chief investigative reporter for The Times, exposed the grooming gangs for what they were. Sadly, he died last month, taken too soon at just 60. His name however, will live on, as a fearless champion of the abused.
Decent people, speaking out. But their voices and others were ignored by successive governments which failed to act on the recommendations of the previous Jay inquiry and other reports to seek justice for victims and prevent other girls from falling into the clutches of such evil predators.
Up to 20 recommendations arising from the existing seven-year inquiry, headed by social work veteran Professor Alexis Jay, which published its final report in 2022, have still to be acted upon.
The Yorkshire Post added its voice, since the start of this year calling for a new national enquiry, survivor-led and independently-run.
Yet the Prime Minister batted off the demands, promising only five local enquiries, remaining evasive on the locations.
Until he asked Baroness Louise Casey, known for her forthright approach, to deliver the findings of her initial investigation into how the grooming gangs scandal had been handled by police, local authorities and other services. She began her investigation believing a national inquiry was not required. What she found convinced her it is vital.
And under pressure from the Conservatives, and knowing that Reform UK, fresh from sweeping the floor in recent local, regional and national elections, is ready to make political capital, Starmer has capitulated.
“I have read every single word of her [Casey’s] report and I am going to accept her recommendation,” he told journalists on the plane to the G7 summit in Canada.
Casey, whilst acknowledging the racist aspect has been seized upon by the far right, emphasised that it is “not racist” to examine the ethnicity of offenders, to help prevent future crime.
She discovered that, desperate not to exacerbate racial tensions in their communities, police and councils refused to record the ethnicity of offenders, omitting a crucial linking factor proving grooming gangs were part of an organised network.
Setting out plans for this national enquiry in the House of Commons on Monday, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, MP for Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley, apologised to victims.
Concluding her statement, she admitted that successive governments had been guilty of inaction. She said she was apologising again, having done so previously, for the “unimaginable pain and suffering you have suffered and the failure of our country’s institutions through the decades to prevent that harm and keep you safe”.
Lives of vulnerable girls, some as young as 10 when the abuse began, have been ruined and many of the thousands of victims will never recover from what they suffered at the hands of nefarious criminals who carried out their sick acts with impunity. Justice might be a hollow word for them, but if any good is to come of this it should be that never again should institutions regard children as somehow complicit in their own abuse.
As Baroness Casey says, “if we’d got this right years ago, seeing these girls as children raped rather than ‘wayward teenagers’ or collaborators in their abuse, collecting ethnicity data and acknowledging as a system that we did not do a good enough job, then I doubt we’d be in this place now.
“It’s time that we drew a line in the sand and took definitive action.”
This is a national enquiry, but it is at local level where its repercussions and recommendations will be put into practice, if we are indeed to draw a line in the sand and make action definitive.