Britain’s national inquiry into child sex abuse has been blasted for ‘cowardice’ over race as it refused to look at grooming gang scandals carried out by mostly Pakistani gangs, or to hear from key witnesses.
Victims of the grooming gangs and their advocates blasted the public probe, which was launched in 2015 and has so far cost taxpayers £143 million, after it emerged would not be examining any of the notorious cases in which ‘Asian’ gangs have preyed on thousands of mostly white, working class girls.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in England and Wales has so far looked at organisations like the Church of England and the Armed Forces to investigate “what went wrong and why” with regards to “institutional failure to protect children from abuse”.
It was believed that the ‘organised networks’ section of the inquiry would look at the mostly Pakistani grooming gangs which have struck in towns across Britain including Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and Telford, while police, social services and local councils turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse.
In two weeks of hearings for this investigation which took place from late September, the IICSA chose not to hear from grooming gang crime experts, victims of the phenomenon, or their advocates like whistleblower and former Greater Manchester Police (GMP) detective Maggie Oliver.
Instead, the probe looked at six areas of England and Wales — Bristol, Durham, St Helens, Swansea, Tower Hamlets and Warwickshire “because they represent a range of sizes, demographics and institutional practices”, according to the Times.
None of these regions has seen a major prosecution involving South Asian grooming gangs, noted the newspaper, reporting that the proportion of the population from Pakistani backgrounds in these areas is lower than the average in England and Wales.
Oliver, who quit GMP in 2012 in order to expose the grooming scandal in Rochdale and has since launched the Maggie Oliver Foundation providing support, therapy and legal advice to survivors of child sexual abuse, disclosed that she was denied the chance to speak at the inquiry.
Speaking on the ITV talk show Loose Women, the former detective said she “repeatedly” requested the opportunity to give evidence at the investigation and was eventually invited to give a witness statement, but two thirds of this was erased by the IICSA.
“Every non-institutional core participant was denied permission to speak in public in the inquiry,” she said, reporting that “forty pages of my statement were deleted, all the statements were hidden behind numbers and symbols on the website.”
“You would imagine with a problem identified in the northern towns and cities like Rotherham and Rochdale and Middlesbrough and Halifax, you would have one of those towns included in a public inquiry looking at grooming gangs,” she said, adding that: “Not one was included. So we had an area like Swansea, St Helens, Warwickshire.”
“There is a massive imbalance in the witnesses, or the participants that have been called, and it meant that the vast majority of the time was being given to those organisations who have failed and still failing victims and survivors of child sexual exploitation and grooming gangs,” the Manchester Evening News reported her saying..
“This isn’t a historical problem, it is going on in every town and city in the north of England,” Oliver stressed. “Even now, even today and I have information from this weekend. This is not a historical problem.
“This is another attempt to silence those with an alternative viewpoint based on fact and knowledge… The establishment don’t want to hear that truth, they peddle out the same platitudes… They always say these are historical failures.
“These are not historical failures. These are current failures, that every single day children are being groomed by gangs of predatory men,” she said, asserting a belief that authorities’ unwillingness to investigate the issue could be “linked to the racial or the religious aspect of it”.
Other figures unimpressed by the inquiry’s focus include Sarah Champion, the Rotherham MP fired from Labour’s front benches for highlighting the problem of Pakistani rape gangs, and Rotherham victim Sammy Woodhouse.
“If you are going to get to the root of gang-related child sexual exploitation you need to go right to the heart of it,” Woodhouse said, blasting the statutory inquiry for being “selective in what they decide to look at”.
“They are trying to bury what happened in places like Rotherham and Rochdale because they’re scared of being called racist,” stated the campaigner, who has previously described herself as “just one of dozens of girls… exploited and viewed as white trash” by drug dealer Arshid Hussain and his associates.
According to the Times, Henrietta Hill QC told the hearing on its opening day that the inquiry “carefully considered the extent to which, if at all, it should focus on areas such as Rochdale, Rotherham and Oxford, all of which have attracted public attention”.
But the IICSA decided, according to Hill, that it would be better for the investigation to instead focus on “different areas, not least because it was intended that this was a forward-looking investigation building on analysis that’s already been done”.
“The two weeks of oral evidence was dominated by the questioning of institutional representatives from the six areas about their safeguarding practices in relation to child exploitation by organised network,” the Times said..
Research by the think tank Quilliam revealed that Muslim men from South Asian backgrounds accounted for 84 per cent of gang members involved in child sexual exploitation.
But critics, including writers in Britain’s highest circulation daily newspaper, have slammed “bleating” over the problem of Muslim rape gangs, claiming that talking about the issue distracts from “important discussions” around topics like “Islamophobia”, as Breitbart London reported earlier this year.
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