By Millie Collins
The spectre of ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ is once again haunting the headlines of the tabloid press. The racist myth that Muslim men are disproportionately perpetrating these crimes has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with whipping up Islamophobia.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk reignited the controversy when he reposted a far-right account claiming that the Government had covered up the scandal in Rotherham ‘out of political correctness’. Musk commented ‘the government officials responsible, including those in the judiciary, need to be fired in shame over this’.
Musk also accused Keir Starmer of being ‘complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years’. He has demanded a new national inquiry and called for a ‘new election in Britain’. This goes along with calling for the release of the fascist leader Tommy Robinson, who faces an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court after falsely accusing a 15-year-old boy of being a rapist in his so-called documentary ‘Silenced’. A judge ordered the self-publicist not to show the film again nor to repeat the slander. After many violations of this court order, he was jailed again.
The facts
Child sexual assault in Britain is a multi-faceted problem, perpetrated by both individuals and groups, assisted by the failure of institutions to protect children or hold abusers to account.
In 2022 Professor Alexis Jay published the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse report after a seven-year national investigation. Its findings concern the extent to which state and non-state institutions failed in their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation.
Jay’s report was based on 76 investigations, inquiry reports and publications. She found that there has been a catastrophic failure by all institutions to perform their statutory duty to protect children from all forms of abuse.
Her report highlights how the institutions adopted a culture of buck- passing, victim blaming and turning a blind eye to abuse. The reputations of individuals and institutions were prioritised over children’s safety. Statutory agencies were not adequately informed, in many cases not at all. Perpetrators were ‘moved on’ and the allegations not investigated any further. Records about child sexual abuse allegations were not kept and often destroyed.
Some institutions had no child protection policies or procedures while volunteer organisations were found to not have any proper records. Where there were policies and procedures, they were often wholly inadequate or not complied with. Previous enquiries’ recommendations were frequently ignored or only sporadically implemented.
The inquiry also highlighted wider societal issues where child victims who came forward were met with disbelief, fear and embarrassment. Many victims were accused of lying, were blamed or silenced without receiving help or protection. Victims and survivors commonly said that the negative responses meant that they didn’t talk about their experiences again for many years, which led some onto a dark path of self-destruction, alcohol and drug abuse, and self-harm.
The report repeatedly states that due to poor and inconsistent data collection across all state services, it is impossible to draw conclusions as to the ethnicity of perpetrators. At no point does the report say that the offences are committed by one singular ethnicity, nor is it just happening in corner shops and takeaways as the far right would have us believe.
The scapegoating of Asian men as the sole perpetrators of CSE only serves one purpose—racist dog whistles to the far right. Not only does this result in violence against immigrant communities, it also causes victims of other offenders to be ignored.
Politicising the issue of sexual violence fails to acknowledge its lifelong impact and hinders the implementation of the vital and urgent overhaul our systems require. Specifically referring to the call for another national inquiry Prof Jay said: ‘Our mission is not to call for new inquiries but to advocate for the full implementation of IICSA’s recommendations.’
Government response
Jay recently told MPs that the Tory response ‘was inconsequential, insubstantial, committed to nothing’. She highlighted these urgent recommendations:
Mandatory reporting for all individuals in certain professions.
A statutory requirement to report any signs of child exploitation to the relevant authorities.
National redress, providing financial compensation to the victims who have been let down by the system, enabling them to get the help they need.
The creation and implementation of a Child Protective Authority, responsible for inspecting all institutions who come into contact with children and overseeing existing inspectoral bodies.
None of these have yet been implemented.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has clashed several times with Starmer over this issue, calling for a full national inquiry: ‘2025 must be the year that the victims start to get justice’. Badenoch met with victims in Oldham, but only after admitting she hadn’t met with any when she called for the inquiry.
In one racist outburst Badenoch blamed ‘peasants’ from ‘sub-communities’ in other countries, claiming there is ‘a culture of “this is not our problem” coming from the state’. She fails to remember that her party was in government when the report was published, so any failure to act on its recommendations lies first and foremost with the Tories.
Due to mounting pressure, Labour’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a ‘Rapid Audit’ which would start imminently to address the ‘current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country’. It will be a three-month review led by Baroness Louise Casey.
In full accordance with the right-wing narrative the focus of this audit will be to look at ‘ethnicity data and demographics of gangs’, completely ignoring the systemic failures of the state at the heart of the report conducted by Jay.
Action
Instead of pandering to the racists, Cooper needs to make the necessary reforms. The one failing that the right has correctly identified is the ability of police and other interviewees to refuse to cooperate with local inquiries. Their compliance must be made mandatory, on pain of prosecution.
For this the powers of local authority designated officers (LADOs) need to be increased. In particular there needs to be independent liaison officers to work with victims, separate from the police who are often distrusted and have a poor record of carrying out their duty of care.
Labour needs to reverse the cuts to council budgets, which continue to fall disproportionately on children’s social care and youth services, which are not statutory services. Those fighting the cuts, including council workers’ unions, must highlight this demand.
But at the same time socialists must emphasise the fact that sexual abuse of children is not the product of one community’s ‘bad culture’ but endemic to all capitalist societies. It thrives in conditions of poverty, where the frustrations and anger at the system are inevitably taken out on children, given the patriarchal nature of capitalism.
Here the far right’s defence of both capitalist exploitation and the family comes into contradiction to their apparent disgust at child abuse. They must be opposed, beginning on 1 February by confronting the fascist march to demand Robinson’s release.
