Starmer’s failure on grooming gangs inquiry hides a chilling truth

The victims of this outrage are being utterly failed by those in power, says Sonia Sodha – if we can’t sort this out, what are the chances that men in organised grooming gangs are still perpetrating their rape and abuse of children with impunity?

Perhaps the national inquiry into grooming gangs was doomed from inception, given the government had to be dragged into holding the inquiry in the first place.

The extent of this heinous form of child sex abuse – the rape of countless vulnerable girls by organised groups of men – has never been established at a national level.

Factors that drive this type of offending – including the uncomfortable fact that culture and racism have clearly played some sort of role, reflected in the disproportionate number of Asian perpetrators involved in the rape gangs in areas like Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire – have never been properly confronted. That left the issue ripe for manipulation by those whose main motivation is to sow division.

‘Perhaps because the prime minister was such a reluctant convert to the need for an inquiry in the first place, it is now in a complete mess’ (House of Commons/UK Parliament)

But, even after Elon Musk did just that earlier this year, no one could have predicted just how much the government was going to adopt an unjustified “nothing to see here” approach.

Perhaps because the prime minister was such a reluctant convert to the need for an inquiry in the first place, it is now in a complete mess. Four survivors have resigned from the inquiry’s advisory panel, citing their concerns that the process was being managed in order to deflect focus from the role Labour-led councils have played in this scandal, and to avoid confronting the difficult questions about the roles culture and racism may have played.

In a letter to the home secretary, they accused the safeguarding minister Jess Phillips of labelling some of their claims “untrue”, and have said they will only return if she resigns.

They were also worried that the two leading candidates for chairing the inquiry, Annie Hudson and Jim Gamble, hailed from social work and police backgrounds, and that this could potentially compromise the independence of an inquiry that would cover these institutions. Both of those candidates have also now withdrawn from the process of appointing a chair.

Ministers initially tried to claim that the multiyear Independent Inquiry on Child Sex Abuse had already done a full investigation into grooming gangs – blatantly untrue. Former Leader of the House Lucy Powell appeared to imply raising the issue was a “dog whistle”.

The government resisted calls to hold a national inquiry despite all the important unanswered questions. It was only when it was clear the political pressure wasn’t going away that it announced instead that Baroness Louise Casey – renowned for her fearlessness in forcing people to confront hard truths – would lead a three-month audit.

Her report was published in June, and it makes for utterly damning reading. It outlines how the child victims of male rape gangs operating across British towns and cities over recent decades have been failed again, and again, and again.

Two common themes stand out. First, the double injustice meted out to these children, who were subjected to the most horrific rape and exploitation, then adultified by the system, seen as complicit in and consenting to their own abuse.

Second, the reluctance of anyone in a position of authority to confront the fact that what data we have suggests that men from particular cultural backgrounds – especially whose family background is from some conservative areas of Pakistan – are over-represented in this type of offending. Despite review after review calling for accurate ethnic data to be captured on offenders, police forces have failed to collect this data, perhaps afraid of what they will find. As Casey outlines, flawed and incomplete has often been marshalled to “dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue. This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities.”

She also found evidence that senior officials have often tried to deflect from culture as a potential factor in offending, making it difficult for more junior frontline staff to challenge them.

This means that cultural factors and racism – such as the attitudes some of these men have towards the white, Hindu and Sikh girls they regard as “impure” – have remained unaddressed. The effect is that child rapists have been able to use their culture and background as a cloak to help make them untouchable. Also as of yet not properly examined is the extent to which the clan-based politics imported in from parts of the Indian subcontinent into some parts of the UK have created power structures that have made it harder to tackle this type of offending at the local level.

These are highly sensitive questions that need to be asked judiciously and impartially by someone who can command trust from all parts of society, not least the survivors of these terrible crimes. There is of course a risk they are hijacked by people with racist agendas, and that needs to be carefully managed. But failing to even ask the questions – or even collect the most basic of data – leaves a vacuum that those people fill anyway, and it is to fail the victims terribly because it denies them the justice of the truth.

To chair such an inquiry was always going to be a difficult task. Starmer has said that Baroness Casey, a veteran troubleshooter, could now be called to assist. Finding the right person should have been at the top of the prime minister’s to-do list. It must be now, if it is not already too late.

It didn’t have to be like this. And it leaves some chilling questions in the air. If ministers are struggling so much to set up the independent inquiry Casey called for in her audit, what are the chances that men in organised grooming gangs are still perpetrating their rape and abuse of children with impunity? If the government can’t even recruit a senior judge to chair an inquiry, do we really think authorities at the local level are acting with a new sense of drive to root out these crimes? The answer to both is appallingly obvious.