Grooming gangs: the rape and pimping of vulnerable girls by men that escaped justice, and the myth that fascists cracked the case
Grooming gangs: the rape and pimping of vulnerable girls by men that escaped justice, and the myth that fascists cracked the case
Believe that Tommy Robinson exposed systematic child sexual abuse across the UK whilst feminists did nothing? Please do read on:
Karen Downes (Charlene’s mother) on a rally organised by a racist group, protesting ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’.
In 2008, the Guardian finally published my investigation into the disappearance of Charlene Downes, almost 5 years since she was last seen alive. I had tried to get the story out three years earlier, having been told about Charlene by campaigners against child sexual exploitation with whom I worked alongside. When I first raised the subject of grooming gangs to editors at the Guardian, I was told, by a senior editor: “The BNP [British National Party] are all over this and it will just add fuel to the fire if we go anywhere near it.”
I explained that the group of campaigners I was working with were not racist, but had been struggling to get police to act on information supplied by victims and their parents about the men involved in raping and pimping children. This work has been going on since the late 1990s, and, I explained, the ethnicity of the majority of the perpetrators mirrored the criminal demographic in the old northern mill towns. This was, I further explained, nothing about Pakistani or Muslim men being inherently abusive, but particular groups running specific criminal operations, such as the white middle-class men who, at the time, were supplying crack cocaine and heroin to small-time dealers.
The BNP had latched onto some of the victims’ parents, and, because they were left in limbo, had swallowed the line about Muslim men treating white girls “like pieces of meat“. I tried to persuade the editor to reconsider, offering a reminder that I was a left-wing feminist concerned about child sexual abuse, and how men as those in Blackpool and elsewhere act with impunity because they rarely get convicted, partly because the victims are often written off as “worthless slags” from “bad families”.
Nevertheless, the Guardian (at that time) wouldn’t touch it, but I was subsequently commissioned by the Sunday Times Magazine. My piece ran in September 2007 (see link), and was the very first in-depth investigation into grooming gangs to be published in a national newspaper, three years before Andrew Norfolk (often commended for being the journalist to ‘break the story of the grooming gangs’) began researching the topic.
Following a change of editorial, the Guardian subsequently commissioned this piece on Charlene Downes. The Blackpool Gazette had run some excellent reports on the story since Charlene had gone missing, but the nationals had previously ignored it.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/may/30/ukcrime.childprotection
This, from September 2007 (Sunday Times) is my piece that the Guardian turned down:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mothers-of-prevention-v6wn7b8vrjc
And my Guardian article (2012) on the racism surrounding the discussion of so-called grooming gangs, which always seemed to get way more attention than the rape and prostitution of working class girls by men who got away with their crimes. Read in full here:
As I wrote, back in 2012: “Much of the media coverage and discussion of the trial of nine men convicted of sexually abusing five teenage girls is focused on ethnicity. That eight of the perpetrators are Asian appears to be more relevant than the reasons why the rape of young, vulnerable girls is so widespread and the crime so difficult to prosecute.”
And now I hear, yet again, the racist discourse around the Charlene Downes case as well as grooming gangs in general. The rumour, based on no evidence whatsoever, that Charlene’s body was “cut up and used as kebab meat” has raised its ugly head again. And if I hear one more time that Tommy Robinson (AKA the fascist fuckwit that capitalised on the rape and torture of working class girls to stir up racist hatred towards brown, migrant men) “uncovered the story” I will scream. The girls, now adults, who survived such atrocities broke the story; decent former police officers such as the whistleblower Maggie Oliver broke the story; the lawyers and campaigners that spoke out with and on behalf of the victims broke the story. One of the many victim/survivors who is appalled at the racism stirred up by what happened to her is Amber, who I interviewed for the Observer Newspaper last year.
Read the interview with Amber in full below:
As you can read in my interview with Amber, her advocates and lawyers, and many the other victim/survivors in the Rochdale scandal have spoken out about what happened to them, both at the hands of the pimps and rapists, and the police.
To credit Tommy Robinson, with anything other than whipping up racial and ethnic tension is outrageous, and, at the very least, ignorant of the history and of the facts. Jimmy Savile, and the hundreds of thousands of men whose names you will never know that make up the vast majority of child sexual abusers are white men. They get away with these crimes because the police, the CPS and the courts so often do not give a damn about the girls. Child sexual abuse is endemic, and when the victims speak out they are all too often disbelieved. To say that the only reason the police were complacent when it came to the grooming gangs of Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford, and elsewhere was because (some of) these men were Pakistani Muslim, is madness. The ethnicity and religion of these men is relevant, but not in the way the racists would have us believe. It is relevant because it was seen as a phenomena perpetrated because of ethnicity as opposed to male violence towards females. Look at it any other way betrays the vast majority of girls that fall prey to these men.
In the photograph above we see Maggie Oliver (and lawyers representing a number of Rochdale grooming gang victims) outside Greater Manchester Police HQ last year as an apology, delivered personally by Stephen Watson, chief constable was issued regarding the range of catastrophic errors by police during one of the country’s most harrowing child sexual abuse scandals. This apology came after ten years of campaigning and litigation by feminists and others involved in calling the authorities to account. All the racists did was muddy the waters and cause more harm to the victims.
To rewrite what happened in relation to the grooming gang scandal, such as that ‘left wing feminists did nothing but protect the perpetrators’ and ‘Tommy Robinson was a hero that exposed it all’ is grotesque. Anyone promoting such falsehoods is doing grave harm to victims past and present, as well as glamourising fascism and racism.
excellent coverage and persistence. The extensive history of this case is new to me. That these girls and mothers and advocates have been treated this way and for so long is criminal.
Male violence towards females is just the everyday roadkill of patriarchy. We're so conditioned to look away that it's not newsworthy unless it can be used by some other narrative or cause like racism. Otherwise it's just airing dirty laundry.