Mick Hartley

Trevor Phillips on the grooming gangs inquiry, and why the particular features of the gangs – overwhelmingly ethnic Pakistani Muslim men abusing young white girls – mark them out as different to the usual cases of sexual abuse of children.

The government has latterly attempted to dilute the inquiry by expanding its scope, a route evidently favoured by Home Office ministers. But yesterday Dame Jasvinder Sanghera, who has been counselling several of the victims, came out strongly against what she described as a “watering down” of the investigation to minimise the racial element of the crime. “They were told that they were white trash, that they mean nothing and they could be targeted,” she told me. The women and girls were feeling “silenced” and “retraumatised” by the very government that had promised to deliver justice.

That’s the issue for these former victims who’ve resigned from the inquiry: the same people who ignored and patronised them at the time are now running the inquiry – and ignoring and patronising them all over again.

Those who see no harm in expanding the scope of the inquiry are simply wrong. There are five major reasons.

First, the scale of the abuse, both in the numbers of men involved and of children. This was and is a crime being carried on at an industrial scale. The true horror of what has happened to tens of thousands of children will probably never be known. As Sanghera points out, why would a woman who has escaped the torture and now has her own family ever reveal her terrible secret?

Second, much has been said about the ethnicity of the perpetrators, less about the fact most of the children are white; they are seen as unclean and “worthless” by the men’s communities, according to Sanghera. As the former home secretary Jack Straw, who for decades represented Blackburn, once said, they are regarded as “easy meat”.

Third, as I learnt 35 years ago in making my first award-winning documentary, which exposed three prolific paedophiles, the common feature of most child sexual exploitation is secrecy. Even before any abuse starts, the child is told that he or she must never tell anyone. Older children are menaced by violence; in younger children, by the threat that if anyone should find out they will be taken away from their parents — or, worse, that their parents will be jailed.

In the grooming gangs, the opposite is true. Girls especially are seduced, often by young men — “loverboys” — in flash cars who give them money, cigarettes and drugs. In our 2015 film we showed that the girls often boast about their “boyfriends”. In due course, they are handed over to older men and passed around like broken toys, frequently to dozens of men.

Crucially, none of this is truly secret, taking place in neighbourhoods where everyone knows that something is going on. It is hard to explain away the presence of a dozen men hanging around a shop or taxi firm with no apparent purpose, each one disappearing for a short while to take his turn at some wretched child.

Fourth, the vast majority of abused children know their abusers. They are relatives, teachers, religious and community leaders, even friends of their parents. By contrast, the grooming gangs’ victims do not know their rapists and may never see them more than once. Many are taken to other towns to be raped by dozens of strangers.And finally, the grooming gangs are the only group of abusers who can and do count on political protection from local authorities, from social workers, from police, often based on ethnic affinity.

This, of course, is the real reason that no one in politics wants to know. The few victims who speak out are heroines. But the villains they can identify are only part of the awful story. The worst moral stench is attached to those who know the truth and turn a blind eye. They should stink to high heaven. But identifying and exposing them will be a painstaking, detailed, filthy task that needs to be pursued without distraction or complication.

That is why the inquiry must not be expanded in scope. We will never catch those who stood by and let it happen with some bureaucratic net, however skilfully spread. We need the cold, hard steel of an investigative rapier to skewer them.

Also, we should never forget the sheer levels of violence and hatred displayed by some of these groomers, See here, for instance.