When some latter-day Edward Gibbon comes to write the history of the decline and fall of our civilisation, he or she will perhaps observe that whenever some shameful failure came to light, we commissioned a report into what had gone wrong.
Nowhere is this more true than in the field of Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE). Here there has been an interminable sequence of reports, and nothing would have induced me to read any of them had I not been requested to write this article.
But they are good reports, much richer and more informative than one would suppose from the petty, point-scoring use which has been made of them in recent days.
Suella Braverman wrote a piece for The Mail on Sunday in which she announced “Mandatory Reporting” of CSE, as recommended by the recent Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, but attracted more notice for saying that the perpetrators of CSE
“are groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani, who hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values. They have been left mostly unchallenged both within their communities and by wider society, despite their activities being an open secret.”
Had the Home Secretary gone too far? Was she sounding a dog-whistle to the Far Right?
John Hayes, MP for South Holland and the Deepings and a close friend of Braverman, told ConHome that on the contrary,
“She’s not a dog-whistle politician. She is probably the bravest person in front-line politics. Sarah Champion, the local [Labour] MP in Rotherham, was also very brave.
“Good people did speak out, but there weren’t enough of them – there was a wilful neglect and reticence.”
Braverman’s article tempted some of her opponents to make this, as so frequently happens in contemporary politics, an argument about racism.
They pointed out that according to a Home Office report published in 2020, “it is difficult to draw conclusions about the ethnicity of offenders as existing research is limited and data collection is poor”.
On reading that report, I found that the then Home Secretary, Priti Patel, does indeed use those words in her foreword. She expresses disappointment at this outcome, “because community and cultural factors are clearly relevant to understanding and tackling offending”, which is why the Government is committed to improving “the collection and analysis of data on group-based child sexual exploitation”.
“A number of high-profile cases – including the offending in Rotherham investigated by Professor Alexis Jay, the Rochdale group convicted as a result of Operation Span, and convictions in Telford – have mainly involved men of Pakistani ethnicity. Beyond specific high-profile cases, the academic literature highlights significant limitations to what can be said about links between ethnicity and this form of offending. Research has found that group-based CSE offenders are most commonly White.”
Further on comes this passage:
“A number of reports have also noted that offenders appeared to operate with a sense of impunity. In her report of CSE following her inspection of Rotherham, Louise Casey attributed this to a ‘credulity gap’, where failure by agencies to grasp the scale, nature, and severity of offending enabled offenders to think they could not be touched…
“Investigators also noticed that because the abuse had gone unaddressed for many years, this had created a sense of resignation in local communities, which further contributed to the feeling of impunity among offenders.”
The debate about racism has been put to one side and a line of thought is explored about why the abuse actually occurs.
Reflections on child sexual exploitation: a report by Louise Casey was published in March 2015, so in the last days of the coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. She observes:
“Adult men prey on children for sex because they think they can do so unnoticed, undisrupted and with impunity. Local authorities and the police need to make their presence felt, to put the pressure on, to show they are looking and the public need to be educated to raise the alarm and report any anxieties about what they observe in the street.”
Casey described another reason why the perpetrators think they can act with impunity:
“Grooming is like brainwashing. A senior police officer in Operation Bullfinch [in Oxford] said that: The girls were ‘the most difficult victims [that officer] had ever had to deal with… as a direct result of their grooming/conditioning. They were isolated so much by their abusers they trusted no one except them – so “helping” agencies or any adult were not to be trusted or cooperated with.'”
She described an atrocious case of a girl raped by seven men, and left alone, hurt, crying and naked in a wood, who called not on her parents, social worker, the police or the ambulance service for help, but on one of the abusers who had just raped her.
In Casey’s view, “a kind of credulity gap has enabled perpetrators to operate with impunity, often in plain sight”. CSE is “so abhorrent that it is often unthinkable”, and “becomes invisible to onlookers, particularly in the earlier stages of grooming”.
People do not want to see what is going on. That is generally the case in any institution or community where evidence of abuse begins to emerge, and was certainly the case in Rotherham, where in August 2014 Alexis Jay produced her 153-page report, in which she estimated that between 1997 and 2013 1400 children were sexually exploited:
“Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the Police gave no priority to CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime. Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003 and 2006 with three reports known to the Police and the Council, which could not have been clearer in their description of the situation in Rotherham.”
For years, everyone in authority denied there was a problem. Jay quotes Dr Angie Heal, who in her 2003 report, ignored by the Police and the Council, said the subject was also taboo in the Asian community.
Jay herself found:
“There was too much reliance by agencies on traditional community leaders such as elected members and imams as being the primary conduit of communication with the Pakistani-heritage community. The Inquiry spoke to several Pakistani-heritage women who felt disenfranchised by this and thought it was a barrier to people coming forward to talk about CSE. Others believed there was wholesale denial of the problem in the Pakistani-heritage community in the same way that other forms of abuse were ignored. Representatives of women’s groups were frustrated that interpretations of the Borough’s problems with CSE were often based on an assumption that similar abuse did not take place in their own community and therefore concentrated mainly on young white girls.
“Both women and men from the community voiced strong concern that other than two meetings in 2011, there had been no direct engagement with them about CSE over the past 15 years, and this needed to be addressed urgently, rather than ‘tiptoeing’ around the issue.”
In an interview with The Guardian in 2015, Jay said:
“I understood that the community in Rotherham were described as coming from possibly three villages in Kashmir, and that this identification was very important to them. Their traditions and relationships, these were not sophisticated, they were very traditional. I was told by many people that previous generations had a different view about women’s place in their culture and their society that certainly wouldn’t accord with any sense that we have.”
Jay did not think Rotherham Council had refused to get to grips with the problem out of “political correctness”:
“I have an aversion to phrases like that,” she says. Instead, she believes the Labour dominated council turned a blind eye to the problem because of “their desire to accommodate a community that would be expected to vote Labour, to not rock the boat, to keep a lid on it, to hope it would go away.”
From January 2011 The Times broke down this “conspiracy of silence” by reporting on it. On Monday of this week, Rishi Sunak announced a new “Grooming Gangs Taskforce” and other measures, and said that
“For too long, political correctness has stopped us from weeding out vile criminals who prey on children and young women.”
Local elections are coming up, no time is left for writing more reports or tiptoeing round sensitive issues, and both main parties want to be seen as tough on crime.
Sunak and Braverman intend to make it hard for Labour to match them, and to sound at ease as they do so, as if being tough is the most reasonable thing in the world.