The lessons never learned and the grooming gangs of the United Kingdom.
Britain’s criminal justice system has to stop failing helpless girls victimised by paedophile predators now.
The sentence “lessons will be learned” has become a terrible cliche regarding government reactions to criminal justice shortcomings. Once said by a cornered police chief or politician, it is difficult to react with anything other than a sarcastic grimace and raised eyebrows as we realise it signifies absolutely nothing.
I vividly recall that being repeated over and over once the scope of child sexual exploitation in the northern town of Rotherham became known in the United Kingdom ten years ago.
Based on a ground-breaking analysis by former senior social worker Alexis Jay, they were published in August 2014, 1,400 children thought to have been sexually abused in the town between 1997 and 2013—primarily by Pakistani-British men. It exposed that although council employees and others knew about the mistreatment, they chose to ignore it and failed to name the offenders in part out of concern for being labelled racist.
The paper exposed the terrible results of neglecting to stop predatory guys from of any racial background for whatever reason from contacting sensitive victims.
Many in positions of authority turned directly into cameras in response to the terrible disclosures in the study and declared, “Lessons will be learned.”
Sadly, though, what happened in Rotherham was not an outlier.
As they were all over the country, girls were also being molested some 60km (35 miles) down the road in Rochdale, Greater Manchester.
The most recent in a long line of studies last month revealed that the National Health Service crisis intervention team in Rochdale has referred 260 victims to children’s social care services; these referrals have ‘not been acted upon over the years’.
Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham commissioned the assessment when he initially took office in 2017. Covering the years 2004 to 2013, the study found at least 96 people still seriously endangering children, most of whom had not yet been convicted. Apologising to the victims, Stephen Watson, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, promised those men a “day of reckoning”. Not one of the guys mentioned in the report has yet been arrested.
The analysis revealed that every state agency had failed hundreds of hundreds of girls singled out by committed sexual offenders. Said, for years, females were “left at the mercy” of predatory men.
Authorities answered the findings once more with platitudes and false pledges. “Lessons will be learned,” they declared.
I hardly see any change occurring.
I first learned of “grooming gangs” existing in the UK during the middle of the 1990s. Mainly, Pakistani-British guys would target weaker girls to profitably sexually exploit them and pass them around among their friends and business partners.
Being a lifetime crusader against men’s violence against women and girls, including child sexual abuse, rape and prostitution, I was particularly interested in the matter. I jumped right in to help uncover and stop this horrible crime.
Shortly after, Irene Ivison founded a company in Leeds, West Yorkshire, in 1996 to honour and seek justice for her daughter Fiona, who had been killed three years before at the age of 17. An older man groomed Fiona from the age of 14 until he had her sell sex on the streets, where a sex customer killed her.
Ivison had established the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping to highlight how every single legislative agency neglected her daughter. She tried to tell the police and social services that the males hunting girls like Fiona belonged to groups engaged in planned abuse rings. She informed them girls are misled into thinking these men love them and are their lovers; once they are besotted, the gang leaders intervene and assign them to work in prostitution. This was late in the 1990s. They did not hear her. They remained silent. They let thousands of females be victimised over the following years and ignored this atrocity.
I also spoke with a lot of parents around this period complaining about police indifference to grooming groups. They said that although neither social services nor the police were interested, their girls were hanging about with older guys and returning home smelling of booze and drugs. They claimed to have turned up hard evidence—number plates and phone numbers matching the men—but nothing was ever checked out. They claimed they had to look into things independently and guard their kids.
Years later, in 2007, my study on the grooming gang phenomena was featured in the Sunday Times Magazine. The first time the problem was thoroughly discussed in a British broadsheet was here. After some time of pitching the article, numerous editors informed me that many of the suspects were of Pakistani background; thus, there was a risk of “being accused of racism”.
Of course, actual racists started to co-opt the subject as people turned away the ever-rising number of grooming gangs abusing young girls across the nation for fear of being called racist. Far-right organisations, including the British National Party, began asserting in pamphlets and speeches that Muslim males are treating white girls as “easy meat” and that ending “mass migration” is the only way to save native women and children in Britain.
The issue is neither immigration nor any racial or religious group. The problem is a criminal justice system designed to fail all victims and the incompetence of those entrusted with safeguarding the most vulnerable in our society.
Indeed, in this nation, there are innumerable white, British-born guys mistreating women and getting away with it. Most white men who mistreat children in the UK are never reported to the police, let alone charged and imprisoned. One aspect of the issue is the police agencies operating in regions with significant Muslim South Asian populations are unwilling to hunt predominantly Muslim South Asian grooming gangs in fear of accusations of racism. Many often, regardless of their racial and religious origin, girls who experience such abuse are not believed by the authorities; occasionally, they are even blamed for what happened to them.
One such victim I know goes under the name Amber.
From 2008 till 2010, Amber suffered in Rochdale under the direction of a disciplined gang. Her nightmare started when she was only fourteen years old. Still, Amber was arrested instead of being recognised and handled like a victim.
She was accused of trafficking her young companions to the individuals already mistreating her and acting as a “madam”. She was finally let go on bond and moved in with a man who had already been detained on grooming suspicions. Not one of her offenders ever faced charges.
I met Amber when she was collaborating with many feminist legal professionals and activists to launch a legal challenge against the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for their treatment of her and other girls like her.
Amber and two other victims at last received reparations and a public apology from the Greater Manchester Police chief constable in April 2022. As a co-conspirator in the prosecution of some of the Rochdale grooming gang members, Amber was named (without knowing) on the charge sheet. Hence, the CPS has been reluctant to give an apology or, indeed, any acknowledgement of the damage inflicted on her. Following years of mistreatment, Amber was labelled as a criminal and subjected to abuse once more by the authorities meant to be looking after her.
Nobody responsible for failing the victims has thus far faced disciplinary discipline; nothing has changed that would stop a repeat performance in the future.
“What the police and CPS did to me was worse than the abuse,” Amber said. “I committed to assist the authorities in stopping it for other people. I expected aid and trusted the police.
“At fourteen, I was the victim of these men. I should have been supported rather than punished.
Among the innumerable victims of sexual violence whose trauma has been exacerbated by stunningly bad police behaviour is Amber. It is no longer debatable that our criminal justice system is not suitable for use since she and others decided to put the cops to task.
Unquestionably, the thorough investigation released this month into the systematic mishandling of Rochdale grooming groups marks a positive move.
Hopefully, this time, “lessons learned” refers precisely to that.