THE Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has come under pressure in recent months to launch a national inquiry into grooming gangs. She has commissioned Baroness Casey to carry out an audit of existing data, and said this week that she would “look at” whatever Baroness Casey’s resulting report recommends.
A question being asked in the media is whether the ethnicity of the perpetrators was a factor in the grooming-gangs scandal. This is a difficult question, which many people have asked, but far fewer seem to want to answer in good faith.
It is important to look at all factors that are germane to who the perpetrators are, and what enables them to offend. This includes asking questions that might be culturally difficult or awkward to raise. Institutional sensitivity to discussing ethnicity was noted as far back as 2014, in the report Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham, which said: “From a political perspective, the approach of avoiding public discussion of the issues was ill judged.” Instead of lowering the temperature of the debate about the scandal, the obfuscatory attitude that was adopted has increased it.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse addressed the issue briefly by looking into institutional failure to gather accurate data on ethnicity. It said that this had led to “a one-sided and often uninformed public debate where links have been made between ethnicity and a number of high-profile cases involving South Asian men. Allowing this debate to continue without providing a proper context allows an accusatory style of debate in the public domain which is both unhelpful and divisive.”
The populist far Right’s presentation of these horrific cases as being only about race and religion is a distortion, treating the scandal as a political football; but it is one that has been kicked into the long grass by local authorities, the police, and the government, and is now booted into a goal marked “immigration” by bad-faith actors such as Elon Musk.
We know that most of the members of the grooming gangs who horrifically abused and sexually exploited mostly young white girls were British Pakistani. This is a fact. But hyper-focusing on ethnicity means that we miss the nuances of these scandals, doing further harm to the girls involved.
In 2013, the Muslim Women’s Network UK published the report Unheard Voices, which uncovered the sexual exploitation of Muslim girls by men in their own communities. There have also been many Sikh victims of grooming gangs, whose experiences have also been obliterated because their stories fall outside the dominant narrative of “Asian men exploiting white working-class girls.”
It is also possible that the excuse given — that action was not taken because authorities did not want to inflame racist tensions — might well be just that: an excuse. To explain their failure to act as due to their not wanting to be accused of racism sounds more morally justifiable than admitting simply to not having cared what grown men were doing to children. Blame can be displaced on to an over-reaching diversity-and-inclusion culture: a sign not of egregious negligence, but of political correctness “gone mad”.
THERE might be a far more compelling, albeit abhorrent, reason that institutions failed in their duty of care. Some of the language reported as having been used towards the girls by their perpetrators is undeniably misogynistic and racist. Degrading terms of sexist and racist abuse were applied to the victims, including Gaia Cooper, who has written a book about her experiences. According to Gaia’s testimony, the men who abused her were disrespectful to the women from their own culture, too, whom they also treated as inferior. The common denominator was not ethnicity: it was misogyny.
The awful tragedy of the scandals is that the sexist attitude of the abusers was mirrored by the institutions whose job it was to protect minors. “She is a very promiscuous girl” is a remark made in an assessment record by children’s services about Erin (not her real name), a 14-year-old in their care, who was being sexually exploited and regularly raped by a gang of much older men, reported by Channel 4 News.
The far-Right claim that immigration has imported a backward culture, which includes medieval attitudes to women, into a far more enlightened Britain conceals the misogyny that is already prevalent here. Erin was also described by social services as “a young girl who had been raped at the weekend and frequently puts herself at risk”. Some of the language used by the authorities, including the police, about Erin and girls like her, can be paraphrased as “She was asking for it.” These were children who were seen by the police as “deviant” and “making a risky lifestyle choice”.
The prevalence of pornography and the sex trade reveals that an eager market for the degradation of women’s bodies flourishes in Britain today; and this does not suggest enlightenment or equality. It normalises the practice of having a separate category of woman and girl whom it is permissible to degrade sexually. It is revealing that, for all the outrage about grooming gangs from the far Right — or, indeed, the pro-sex-work far Left — there are no connections being drawn between the prevalence of pornography and harmful attitudes to women and young girls. If there is one factor that we need to zone in on, it is this one.
IN THE context of the Church, defensiveness about abuse scandals uncovered within specific theological traditions has caused resistance to exploring the deeper factors that underpin the abuse. Ecclesiological sensitivity should not be used as an excuse not to ask uncomfortable questions about particular theologies, especially when patterns of abuse emerge. Such questions include: Why are men the perpetrators of the vast majority of abuse? Is there one tradition that is over-represented in abuse cases? If so, is this relevant to why abuse was able to flourish in that particular context?
Correlation, as we know, is not necessarily causation, but we cannot know that for certain unless we do the uncomfortable work of interrogating why. “Abuse can happen anywhere” sounds increasingly dismissive if we are unwilling to further our understanding of why it happens.
Similarly, platitudinous statements to excuse abuse, such as “We are all sinners,” might be objectively true, but they obfuscate the complexity of the dynamics involved in abuse, and let important questions go unasked. The stigmatisation of entire groups should obviously be avoided, but “we all fall short of the glory of God” is a simplistic deflection, devoid of analysis. It does nothing to further the mission to make the Church a safer place for all.
The grooming-gangs scandals illustrate how refusing to face challenging issues head-on does a disservice to the victims and makes a bad situation worse. What difficult questions is the Church avoiding asking? Doing the necessary work of tackling hard questions is a prophetic chore, which we must not shy away from, most especially when we fear the answers.
Jayne Manfredi is an Anglican deacon, writer, and radio broadcaster.
offtherailsbyjayne.substack.com
Read her latest television review here.
