In January, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the Government would conduct five local inquiries into the rape gangs which have terrorised so many innocent children across our country — and may still be doing so.
Local inquiries are not enough. Unlike national statutory inquiries, they can’t compel witnesses, they can’t look at themes across the country, and they can’t address national policy problems, like how to deport foreign criminals.
But now even this commitment to local inquiries has been watered down further, in a statement given to the House of Commons by Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls Minister Jess Phillips in the final hours before Parliament rose for the Easter recess.
Understandably, the public is incensed. Bizarrely, this seems to have taken the Government by surprise. In response, they panicked and claimed they weren’t watering it down at all (Cooper said that very suggestion was, “political misinformation”). The real problem, according to the Government, was people hadn’t realised this was actually an upgrade. A “Home Office source” went so far as to say that there might in fact be more than five local inquiries.
This is untrue, and that last suggestion is particularly risible.
These inquiries were supposed to be carried out by an independent barrister. But the person they chose, Tom Crowther KC, has heard almost nothing from the Home Office in the last three months. He was told so little that he had to contact officials and say, “do you still want me?” In fact, the Government had decided that rather than have properly independent local inquiries, ministers and advisers would write the framework for them themselves.
The weakened approach is further evidenced in the Minister’s own statement, which said the Home Office is “developing a best practice framework” for “local inquiries or related work”. “Related work” is not an inquiry. It went on to say that, “following feedback from local authorities” — many of whom stand accused of covering up these disgusting crimes — the Government “will adopt a more flexible approach”. “A more flexible approach” is not an inquiry.
As for the idea that there might be more than five inquiries — the Telford inquiry alone cost £8m. How exactly are they going to hold “more than five” proper independent inquiries for only £5m? (And that’s not £5m each. That’s £5m for all of them.)
And still, we know no details. How many local inquiries? Where will they be? How will those places be chosen? Will local councils be able to decide whether or not they are investigated? If it’s more than five, how many more? Why not fifty? Why shouldn’t all victims get the justice that they deserve?
The crimes against children — the systematic rapes and sexual torture — committed by these gangs are almost indescribable in their obscenity. Some of the details are available in transcripts of court judgements published online. These are disturbing and upsetting, but please, do read them if you can bear it. We must look this depravity squarely in the face.
Further transcripts have been obtained by the brilliant Adam Wren and his team at Open Justice UK. These are not yet all available to the public, but once they’ve been redacted and legally checked, they will be. Open Justice UK has been refused access to other transcripts on the basis that publishing them would not be “in the public interest”. This is despite the fact that these were public trials held in open court, and nobody is proposing revealing the identity of victims and survivors.
The girls we are talking about (there were also some male victims) are predominantly white. The men who preyed on them were predominantly Asian Muslims, generally either from Pakistan or of Pakistani heritage. One of the victims from Dewsbury was told by her rapist, “we’re here to f**k all the white girls and f**k the government.” This shows that at least some, and very possibly many, of these crimes were racially and religiously aggravated.
How, without a national inquiry, can we understand what part all these factors played?
We also know that the demographics of the perpetrators and the victims were partly behind the complete failure of the British state to do something about this earlier. In 2010, West Midlands Police suppressed a report on how gangs were sexually grooming girls, targeting schools and children’s homes, over fears the findings would cause racial disharmony. Or, as they put it, “the predominant offender profile of Pakistani Muslim males… combined with the predominant victim profile of white females has the potential to cause significant community tensions.”
How, without a national inquiry, can we understand what part all these factors played?
There is no question that the state has failed these children time and again. Take the case of “Anna” from Bradford. Vulnerable and in residential care, at the age of 14 she made repeated reports of rape and abuse to social workers who were responsible for her. But just the following year, aged 15, she “married” her abuser in a traditional Islamic wedding ceremony. Far from stepping in to stop it, her social worker went along. The authorities then arranged for her to be fostered by her abuser’s parents.
The ringleader of the Rochdale rape gang, Shabir Ahmed, was employed as a welfare rights officer by Oldham Council.
And yet not one person — not one — has been convicted for covering up these institutionalised rapes. So why have ministers refused to establish a dedicated unit in the National Crime Agency to investigate councillors and officials accused of collusion and corruption?
Sadly, that unit must also investigate police officers. In one case, the father of an abuse victim in Rotherham was arrested by South Yorkshire Police when he attempted to rescue his daughter from her abusers. He was detained twice in one night while, on the very same evening, his daughter was repeatedly assaulted and abused by a gang of men.
How, without a national enquiry, can we know how and why these monsters enjoyed effective immunity for so long, and how can we be sure it will not happen again?
We (the Conservatives in Parliament) have voted for a national inquiry, and tabled amendments to the Police and Crime Bill which would guarantee the publication of ethnicity data on a quarterly basis, terminate the parental rights of convicted sex offenders, and make membership of a grooming gang an aggravating factor during sentencing so that offenders get the longer, harsher sentences that they deserve. We very much hope the Government will adopt these amendments to protect our children, and we will not stop fighting for a national inquiry, fighting to ensure any local inquiries are genuinely independent and properly funded, and fighting for prosecutions for covering up these crimes.
But this is not about us. This is not about politicians. This is about the little girls up and down our country whose brutal and repeated rapes were permitted and hidden by those in the British state whose job was to protect them. They deserve justice. In five towns, these children and their families may get partial answers. But I have mentioned five towns just in these few paragraphs alone, and there are at least forty-five more. In those places, they will get no answers at all.
And neither will we, the British people. We deserve to know the truth. What darker truths does the suffering of these girls reveal about this country? And why won’t the Government find out?
