The grooming gang row shows what happens when you allow an information vacuum to form - David Behrens
The rioting that saw Neanderthals with Union Jacks descend on Rotherham and set light to a Holiday Inn Express full of asylum seekers didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the perpetrators had heard tales of grooming gangs committing institutionalised acts of abuse against local girls.
They did not know the details; they knew only that the gangs had cultural values different to their own. So they projected their prejudice onto everyone they presumed to be different. It was as tribal as that: us and them.
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Hide AdThe scale of what had gone on in Rotherham and other Northern towns did not become known until much later when a report by Professor Alexis Jay revealed that over 16 years, some 1,500 children were sexually exploited by gangs of mainly Asian males while police and agencies turned the other way because they thought that to do anything else might be deemed racist.


The scars of this outrage have been a festering sore on community relations and the fact that the subject has boiled over once more into the national discourse demonstrates how little we have learned. Instead of being open and honest we’re still trying to shut down debate.
It seemed on the face of it inexplicable for the Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips to deny Oldham Council a Home Office inquiry into its own grooming gangs. It was a matter for council officials to investigate themselves, she said.
Without any context her reasoning rang hollow. She maintained it was not for the Government to intervene. But why not? Isn’t that what governments are for?
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Hide AdElon Musk certainly thought so. Devoid of any background knowledge, the demagogic owner of what used to be called Twitter labelled her a “rape genocide apologist” and suggested she should be in jail.
There are a number of points here, the first of which is that Elon Musk is an unelected pot-stirrer of whom we take far too much notice. He is driven by a misguided obsession with his particular brand of free speech, which is to give everyone alive the right to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre.
But freedom of speech carries with it a responsibility to speak the truth. When the truth is hidden, or appears to be, misinformation takes root. And between them, Musk and Phillips unleashed a whole load of it.
The Conservatives, in whose administration the Jay Report was published and who could have constructively diverted attention towards its recommendations, chose instead to pander to conspiracy theorists on the far right. The party could cap immigration from “alien cultures with medieval attitudes towards women”, suggested its self-interested justice spokesman Robert Jenrick.
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Hide AdHe went on to blame the grooming scandal on Pakistani men, a detail which further undermined the motives of those hotel rioters last summer since their targets were from other countries entirely.
It fell to Alexis Jay herself to articulate what Ms Phillips should have done in the first place. The time had passed for another lengthy examination of grooming gangs, she said. The row was distracting from the issues. Action was what was needed.
But – and this was perhaps the point Oldham Council was making – action on an issue as sensitive as this is bound to make people uncomfortable. Policymakers have striven for decades to be race-neutral but race is ingrained in these crimes. And only by acknowledging and addressing that – by talking to communities to understand how it happened and how it can be prevented in future – can authorities begin to staunch the drip-feed of half-truths that emboldens the conspiracy theorists.
It’s a cultural tightrope they are going to have to navigate by themselves, though, because the Church of England, our own medieval instrument of state whose moral compass is supposed to guide us, is culpably silent. It is compromised and consumed by a grooming scandal of its own: the institutionalised abuse of young people over many years and a failure by its leaders to confront those responsible. The parallels with Rotherham are striking.
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Hide AdSo we can expect no enlightenment there. But let’s not turn instead to false gods who seek to gratify us by telling us what they think we want to hear. Elon Musk, a South African who grew up under apartheid, should know better than most the danger of feeding people a big lie.
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