Content note: This article discusses child sexual exploitation and abuse. No graphic detail is included, but some readers may find the subject distressing.
The sexual abuse of children by grooming gangs is real and shocking. As Louise Casey’s report says, “it is one of the most horrendous crimes in our society”, and she documents the repeated failures of government and public services to tackle it.
But the issue also provides fertile ground to bring far right politicians into the mainstream. It enables them to craft a narrative which leads ordinary people, concerned about vulnerable children – and perhaps people with a prurient interest in sex – gradually to believe that we live in a failing state, under attack from hostile ‘others’ (foreigners, immigrants, and non-white groups). Their aim is to win the argument that only an authoritarian government of the right can protect ‘our women and children’ from foreigners and immigrants.
But the women and children may only be tools for a deeper purpose.
The Casey review
So first, some facts. In January, the present government commissioned Baroness Louise Casey to undertake an urgent ‘National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse’. Her report, published in June, is excoriating. She describes “a repeating cycle: seminal moments of scandal and public outrage which lead to bursts of government focus and activity but no sustained improvement, leaving victims and the public with insufficient justice, action, accountability or answers.” A series of investigations had repeatedly found system failures in information sharing, a lack of training and understanding of risk factors of victims, and lack of data and information on perpetrators, including their ethnicity.
Casey observes that the failures have a root in a historic belief that those experiencing abuse are complicit, not victims. Victims’ stories have been ignored, and often it has been the victim, not the perpetrator, who is prosecuted. And in the absence of clear agreed definitions, inconsistent data means we know little about what is actually going on.
She suggests that perhaps 500,000 children experience sexual abuse of some form every year, most of which is never reported. The police recorded 100,000 offences in 2023, including 17,000 cases of child sexual exploitation, and 700 cases of group based sexual exploitation. Most victims are girls aged 10-15, and most perpetrators are men, but 40% of these are themselves under 16. Data on ethnicity is not routinely collected, but there is evidence which needs exploration, that a disproportionate number of perpetrators are from Asian ethnic backgrounds. She found weaknesses in the response of children’s services, health services and police.
Her twelve specific recommendations to government include:
- Ensuring that all sexual penetration of a child under 16 will automatically be charged as rape
- Cancel the convictions of child sexual exploitation victims found to have been criminalised instead of protected
- Make major changes in data collection to make it possible to identify patterns among perpetrators and victims, including ethnicity, and require data sharing between agencies, monitored by the forthcoming Child Protection Authority
- Treat child exploitation cases like serious and organised crime
- Commission research into the underlying social drivers for group-based child sexual exploitation
- Regulate the taxi industry more rigorously
- Commit sufficient resources to implement the recommendations over a multi-year period, including regular parliamentary review
The government immediately accepted all the recommendations, and has published a detailed account of the actions which are now proposed. They include a review of 800 cases originally dropped by the police, a coordinated national police operation, and setting up a statutory Independent Commission on Grooming Gangs.
The Lowe inquiry
However, the Casey recommendations are detailed and technical, and most people will neither read nor understand them. They lack the visceral appeal of horror stories about specific cases. And that is where politicians on the right step in. Most people are moved, not by improvements in data collection or prosecution rates, but, as Casey said, by “scandal and public outrage”.
So, Rupert Lowe, millionaire MP for Great Yarmouth, expelled from Reform UK after quarrelling with Nigel Farage, has launched his own, crowdfunded, Inquiry. His claim is that, unlike government inquiries, this will hear and publish the voices of the victims.
Lowe’s appeal has had widespread support. So far it has raised £621,935, and claims nearly 10,000 online supporters. His ‘qualified advisory panel’ includes former MP Esther McVey and another ex-Reform MP, James McMurdock. Lowe also has a staff team travelling the country to record the stories of survivors, family members and whistleblowers. His Victim Liaison Officer is Sammy Woodhouse, who was key to exposing the Rotherham grooming gang story.
He claims to have identified 85 local authorities with a history of gang-based sexual exploitation of children, predominantly by Pakistani men, and ignored by authorities, and with cases dating back to the 1960s.
He plans later to hold public, online, hearings with witnesses, to be followed by a published report.
Technocrats and populists
There is no political disagreement about the need for action. The crimes involved are horrendous, and there is general recognition that public authorities have failed to respond adequately over decades. But we do see two very different political responses.
The government approach is technocratic: commission an expert report, and, when that report was delivered, accept its recommendations in full. This will involve a series of detailed technical measures to reform the way public bodies operate, and to clarify the law and the guidance to police and other public services on what they should do to rectify things. This is welcome. It will mean more prosecutions and better protection for children. In time it should make a significant difference.
The right wing approach is different: to hear, and amplify, the voices of some victims. Some will feel this is a kind of justice, and it will certainly command public attention. It is very likely that Lowe and others will use this to claim that the present government has failed, although many of the issues go back decades. It will also feed a narrative that the problems stem from cultural issues involving Pakistani men. These have been highlighted in Lowe’s first releases about the Inquiry, although Casey says that the data is simply inadequate to confirm or deny that there is a specific ethnic issue. It is not evident how Lowe’s report will provide an objective account of that.
The real battle
This is a real issue, about which people genuinely care. But in many ways it is a proxy for a war between two kinds of politics: the measured and technical politics of Keir Starmer, which can be slow, with much work behind the scenes, or the politics of Lowe and Farage, built on highly visible, emotional responses to these cases.
The Starmer approach is unlikely to attract much public interest or understanding. The right-wing approach will tell horror stories of victims abandoned by the state, and claim that the only answer is authoritarian measures, especially based on ethnic and cultural divisions.
For decades, public services and politicians of all kinds paid little attention to victims of child sexual exploitation. Now, their suffering has finally captured wider attention – but are they really more than pawns in a much bigger and nastier political game?
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