Terina Hine takes apart the racist narrative around ‘grooming gangs’ 

A girl aged ten dismissed as a prostitute, police calling abused girls ‘slags’ and their abuse a ‘lifestyle choice’, children arrested for being ‘drunk and disorderly’ yet not the men feeding them drink: these are just a few examples of how appallingly some child victims of ‘grooming gangs’ were treated by the state. 

Will Starmer’s new national inquiry help? Maybe. But it definitely won’t if it takes years, its recommendations are ignored or if it’s hijacked by political opportunists like Farage and Badenoch. 

It’s not as if we haven’t had inquiries into the matter before. So far, we’ve had two local inquiries in Rotherham and Telford, reviews in Oldham and Rochdale and a seven-year £187m inquiry by child-protection expert Prof Alexis Jay, which reported in 2022 and came up with twenty recommendations, most of which remain outstanding. 

Labour is correct to note that for years the Tories in government failed to act, and for all her recent bluster, Badenoch herself did nothing when minister for Women and Equalities. Starmer correctly accused Badenoch of ‘jumping on a far-right bandwagon’ when she called for a new national inquiry earlier this year, but it’s not unreasonable to accuse him of the same as he makes the call now, even if it is done under cover of the recently-published Casey audit. 

Baroness Casey’s damning 200-page audit has exposed a history of institutional state failure from 2009-25, reporting a catalogue of failings in schools, religious institutions, the police, social and health services and both Tory and Labour local councils. 

It’s a massive scandal involving tens of thousands of young, mostly female victims. In Rotherham, at least 1,400 girls were abused; in Telford, estimates suggest over 1,000 children were abused over three decades; in Rochdale, 74 victims were identified, and there’s evidence of a much wider problem. The exact figures may be disputed, but that many thousands of young lives have been destroyed and the state did worse than nothing about it, is not. 

Rather than deal with either the causes or the criminals, our politicians have chosen to use the cases of these young victims for their own political gain in a highly racialised war of words. Even Elon Musk saw fit to weigh in, echoing the far too familiar tropes of Islamophobic prejudice. 

Ethnicity data on perpetrators was only recorded in a third of cases, which, Casey emphasised, is ‘not sufficient to allow any conclusions to be drawn at the national level.’ Not that you could hear her above the racist howls. That’s not to say that Casey didn’t find British-Pakistani men ‘over-represented’ as perpetrators in some of the regional child-exploitation statistics, she did. She also found ethnicity had been ‘shied away from’ in some investigations. Even so, it’s crucially important to note that, in most cases going back to 2002, no ethnicity data was recorded. 

Where data does exist, for example in the Hydrant programme, which collated police data on perpetrators and victims in child-sexual exploitation (CSE) cases between 2022-3, it found that 83% of CSE suspects were white, 7% Asian, 5% black.  

Claims that girls were ignored while men went free because of political correctness do not hold up in face of the facts. The police as woke warriors was never a believable line: lack of convictions are far more likely the result of ingrained misogynist views and a complete lack of respect for children in care. 

State institutions consistently failed these most vulnerable of girls over decades: from the police to schools, councils to social workers. Public inquiries are slow and expensive, often tell us little we don’t already know and can simply be a way for politicians to delay action and brush difficult issues under the carpet. That both political parties are complicit in the covering up of CSE makes this more likely. 

Blaming race and culture has provided an excuse for what was a shocking official response to the sexual abuse of working-class girls. It has provided a distraction which enables huge cuts to mental-health and children’s services to continue along with the underfunding of victim-support groups. Casey made clear that grooming gangs are still very much among us. Now is surely the time for action, not for more reports and more words. 

From this month’s Counterfire freesheet