The Government’s grooming gangs inquiry risks becoming another exercise in evasion rather than truth
On June 13th 2023, Valdo Calocane, a migrant originally from Guinea-Bissau, fatally stabbed three people and injured three others during a psychotic rampage. Calocane had a long history of serious mental illness and instability; he first came to the attention of the authorities when he broke down a neighbour’s door during a schizophrenic episode three years earlier.
So why was he not kept away from the public? Because, according to testimony at the ongoing inquiry into Calocane’s frenzied attacks, mental health workers feared sectioning him, on the grounds that black men are “overrepresented” in mental health facilities.
The fear of being perceived as racist had trumped public safety. The results were predictable, and desperately sad.
Unfortunately, Calocane’s case is not the only example of institutional “anti-racism” leading to very real harm. In January, it was reported that the Met Police had hired candidates who failed background checks, including a serial sex offender accused of raping a child, in an effort to boost diversity within the force – as covered by Policy Exchange’s David Spencer in the latest edition of The Critic.
The most obvious case is perhaps that of the grooming and rape gangs, which operated across dozens of towns, over decades, and abused thousands of children.
In most of the cases that we know about, the perpetrators of these crimes were Muslim men, either from Pakistan or of Pakistani heritage. Their victims were mostly white working-class girls. Institutions like the police, local councils, and care homes were made aware of this abuse, repeatedly, by both the victims themselves and people around them.
Yet time and time again, those institutions covered up these crimes, or turned a blind eye. Often, it’s because they feared being perceived as racist. That was the explicit logic of West Mercia Police who, according to the report into the grooming gangs in Telford, feared that fully investigating the crimes would “inflame community tensions.”
In her rapid review into the grooming gangs, Baroness Casey concluded that “we found many examples of organisations avoiding the topic [of race and religion] altogether, for fearing of appearing racist, raising community tensions, or causing community cohesion problems.”
The result was that these gangs were able to get away with grooming, trafficking, kidnapping, torturing, and raping thousands of children.
When the Government announced that they’d finally conduct an inquiry into the grooming gangs, I was hopeful that this would provide an opportunity to confront the poisonous institutional culture which led to these crimes taking place. This should have been an opportunity to confront, head on, why Pakistani Muslim men targeted white children in these cases. It should have been the catalyst for a sober analysis of why so many people put their belief in ‘anti-racism’ before their duty to keep children safe.
Yet this Government seems committed to preventing any such confrontation from taking place. This inquiry, like all inquiries, must be conducted according to a ‘terms of reference’, which sets out what the inquiry will explore, and what it will aim to achieve.
The draft terms of reference published by the Government for this inquiry provide no scope to explore the causal role that race or religion may have played in these crimes. That means no discussion of why Pakistani Muslim men targeted white children in towns across the country.
Likewise, there’s no scope to discuss whether race, or so-called “community tensions”, played a role in the deliberate cover-up of these horrific crimes by the authorities. There’s no intention of discussing whether judges gave unduly lenient sentences to perpetrators because of their background, or to uncover links between grooming gangs and organised crime in countries like Pakistan or Albania.
In other words, the inquiry won’t actually try to uncover why these crimes happened, or why they were covered up. The Government is instead trying to reduce it to a bureaucratic exercise in “lessons learned”.
Failure to fully acknowledge the role of race and religion isn’t the only failure of these draft terms of reference, though. The inquiry will have no scope to consider cases before 2000, and won’t investigate every instance of grooming gangs, just a select handful. Outrageously, the inquiry will have no power to recommend the prosecution of those who covered up these crimes. Instead, it has been charged with implementing a series of best practice recommendations, working alongside the very institutions which were responsible for the cover-up in the first place.
This is plainly wrong. It’s another attempt to deceive the public, and another example of those in authority failing grooming gang victims. But fortunately, there’s still time to force the Government to change course.
The terms of reference are subject to a consultation, which closes on Friday 6th March. Any member of the public can write in, and express their views. We’ve compiled the problems with the current terms of reference at groominggangjustice.uk – if you agree that the inquiry must uncover the full truth, then you can put in your details, and we’ll submit a response to the consultation on your behalf demanding a proper inquiry.
It only takes a moment, but if enough people make their voices heard, we can force the Government to confront these issues head-on. This inquiry is the single best opportunity to root out the poisonous ideology, which calls itself “anti-racism”, that now sits at the heart of many of our institutions. The cost of these ideas can be measured in lives; we must do everything that we can to expunge them.
