A new report from the state-sponsored Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) has revealed that police forces and officials are still “victim-blaming” children preyed on by groomers, and failing to record child sexual exploitation and predator ethnicity to avoid bad publicity.
The inquiry, focusing on St Helens, Tower Hamlets, Swansea, Durham, Bristol, and Warwickshire as case study areas in its official report, said it suspected that “some institutional leaders [are] more keen to assure themselves that their area is ‘not another Rochdale or Rotherham’, rather than being determined to find and root out child sexual exploitation in their area and expose its scale.”
The report went on to say that the areas are downplaying abuse because they “do not wish to be labelled as ‘another Rochdale or Rotherham’” in the eyes of the public.
This mentality misses the point that the reason Rochdale and Rotherham became national and even international pariahs in the first place was their failure to acknowledge and take on mostly Muslim rape gangs for fear of being branded racist or stoking “racial tensions”.
As with investigations into rape gang activity in Rotherham, Rochdale, and other child grooming hotspots such as Telford in recent years, the IICSA inquiry has found police sometimes appear not to understand that children cannot consent to sexual activity, and at times attribute victims’ abuse to their own “risky behaviour”.
The report cited examples of one child being described as “putting herself at risk” and another as “prostituting herself” in Bristol, for example, while case files in County Durham referred to abuse involving victims who in some cases were not yet 13 and predators in their twenties as “consensual sexual acts between young people”.
Some of the areas investigating child sexual exploitation appeared to be in total denial about the prevalence of organised grooming, with Swansea and Tower Hamlets reporting that “that there were no known or reported organised networks in their areas” despite the report finding significant evidence to the contrary.
The inquiry also found “a widespread failure in the case study areas to record the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims of child sexual exploitation” — despite much empty talk from politicians, police chiefs, and local government officials that they would no longer put their heads in the sand about the racial elements of grooming gang exploitation after the Rochdale and Rotherham scandals broke.
“Accurate data on the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims play an important part in enhancing understanding of crimes and the contexts in which they occur,” their report noted, lamenting that “little progress has been made” in gathering data on offender and victim ethnicity at the national level.
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