With the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham breaking ranks with Keir Starmer by calling for a national inquiry into grooming gangs, pressure on the UK Government to organise one is intensifying.
Following Labour MPs helping to strike down a Tory amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing Bill which called for a statutory inquiry into the matter, a YouGov poll found that 76% of the British public back demands for a national investigation. But what would a national public inquiry look like?
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) covered only England and Wales, and focused on six parts of the country in its report on child sexual exploitation by organised networks: Tower Hamlets, Bristol, Durham, Warwickshire, St Helens, and Swansea. The IICSA did not cover cases of group-localised child sexual exploitation (GLCSE) – informally known as street-based grooming – in areas that were already the subject of ‘independent investigation’. This includes towns such as Rotherham in south Yorkshire and Telford in Shropshire, which have been the focus of reports which looked into long-standing grooming-gang activity, but did not determine specific accountability through the public interrogation of officials across relevant local councils and police forces.
Unlike the IICSA (which focused on England and Wales), the proposed statutory inquiry should specifically investigate the scourge of GLCSE across the four home nations – making it a truly UK-wide exercise. It should be based on three pillars: 1) the socio-cultural and socio-economic factors behind GLCSE, 2) the reasons behind institutional failings connected to GLCSE, and 3) determining public-sector accountability for failures to protect and deliver justice for victims of GLCSE.
Pillar 1 is especially relevant, with Andrew Norfolk – the investigative reporter at The Times who played an integral part in bringing the industrial-scale rape and torture of underage girls in Rotherham to attention – calling for a deeper understanding of the causes behind grooming-gang activity. While much of the focus has been on English cases of GLCSE involving white-British underaged victims and adult male perpetrators of Pakistani-Muslim heritage (with a 2018 academic study showing that this group dominates GLCSE prosecutions), this framing overlooks cases which do not match this demographic patterning. This includes the recent conviction of a Romanian grooming gang for raping and sexually abusing ten women in flats across the Scottish city of Dundee (with a female being among those convicted). It is also worth noting that there have been non-white victims of GLCSE, as highlighted by organisations such as the Muslim Women’s Network UK. Cultural codes of ‘honour’ and ‘shame’ should be explored in the context of GLCSE victims being coerced and silenced within ethnic-minority communities.
Pillar 2 of a hypothetical national public inquiry into GLCSE would investigate the factors behind institutional failures in protecting victims and the failure to properly investigate cases of GLCSE. There is the possibility that many of these failings were the by-products of a toxic fusion of the old and new – traditional classism blended with modern sensitivities over race and religion. The desire not to rock the ‘diversity boat’ and ‘preserve’ community relations, along with victim-blaming tendencies fuelled by class-based prejudices, should be an integral part of a national inquiry into grooming gangs – an examination of the ‘classist multicultural state’.
This flows into the third and final pillar – determining public-sector accountability. A truly national investigation will look at the role of central government, devolved administrations, the Crown Prosecution Service, local councils, police forces, NHS trusts and the school system; the degree to which social workers and safeguarding teams neglected their basic duty of care and failed to treat the most vulnerable members of society with respect and dignity. There must be a realistic prospect of the inquiry being a meaningful step towards the prosecution of public officials held responsible – both former and serving – or at the very least, the removal of those from their current positions.
Much consideration should be given to who is selected to chair such an inquiry. The nationwide scourge of GLCSE involves failures of the British state at every level – meaning that any inquiry chaired by an individual closely connected to, or indeed currently part of the British state, may not be viewed as credible. One option is selecting a judicial figure with considerable relevant experience from Australia, Canada or New Zealand – Anglosphere countries of the Commonwealth. Another option is appointing an experienced British expert who has vast knowledge on the subject but has traditionally kept distance from doing work on behalf of the British state.
By solely looking into GLCSE and having a laser-sharp focus on determining accountability, a statutory inquiry into grooming gangs can be both impactful and cost-effective – not an expensive and protracted exercise of little consequence.
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