Inside London’s grooming gang shame

0:02Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show, the real story of London's harrowing grooming gang epidemic. It's a wide ranging problem across the city, across all the boroughs. And it is something that, because it is linked to so many different things, is very hard for police and social services and all the other authorities involved to tackle. But first, a warning that you may find the content of this episode distressing. The grooming gang scandal has been largely focused on towns in the north of England.

0:48What if the same sort of thing was happening on a significant scale on the streets of the capital? Cast your mind back to 2017, a couple of years after the national scandal of grooming gangs operating in Rotherham hit the headlines. In East London, another investigation was in the works, called Operation Grand By. Four girls, aged between 13 and 15, alleged they had been raped by men based around the Stratford Centre. Officers went on to identify 18 girls as victims, mostly aged 14 and 15. Detectives acted swiftly, and the arrest of six men followed, although half of these suspects were themselves aged 16 or under.

1:33Two of the men were aged 21 and one 34, and police issued nine child abduction warning notices, which is a tool used to disrupt relationships between adults and children when the exploitation is suspected. Then progress stalled. And it turns out the teens targeted in this area of East London were not the only victims, with countless cases of child exploitation continuing across the capital. But when Sir Sadiq Khan was questioned about it earlier this year, he said the focus in the city was primarily on county lines drug dealing. When pushed by the Conservatives' leader on the London Assembly, Susan Hall, he denied knowing what she meant by a grooming gang.

2:20These gangs of people that are grooming young girls for sex, Do we actually have those in London? Today we need to give a full answer. Can she be clear what she means by that? I'm not sure what she means. How much clearer do you want me to be? Look at the gangs that they've uncovered in other parts of the country. Do we have those gangs in London? It's a simple question. The answer is very simple. It's yes or no. I'm not sure why she's so nervous to say what she means. What do you mean? No, no, no, no. I'm saying exactly what I mean. I'm saying, have we got any of those grooming gangs in London?

3:00I'm unfair to what is meant by the question. If you could spell it out, I can answer. Is this willful ignorance or an institutional cover-up? A recent government-ordered audit found that there was a mismatch in the way that the Metropolitan Police and London councils were recording incidents of child exploitation and child sexual abuse. This makes it incredibly hard to uncover the true scale of the problem. In June, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer committed to a full inquiry into group-based child sexual abuse. But this week, two abuse survivors resigned from its oversight panel and accused the Home Office of contempt and political interference.

3:43The Prime Minister's spokesman has denied the National Inquiry is in crisis. and speaking in the Commons today, Sir Keir Starmer defended the government's grooming inquiry. The inquiry is not and will never be watered down. Its scope will not change. It will examine the ethnicity and religion of the offenders. Joining us now is The Standards' Chief Political Correspondent Rachel Burford, who has been leading an investigation inside London's grooming gang shame. Rachel, how did this investigation come together? We spoke to a lot of people for this investigation, social workers, charities, safeguarding professionals and survivors.

4:28They all told us that there was grooming gangs operating in the capital on wide scale. Essentially, we also uncovered reports that are done by councils when a very serious incident happens to a child and we uncovered several of them which appear to show young girls mainly in care vulnerable who had been groomed by groups of men for sex and they had been found in horrendous situations. So tell me a bit more about these victims. Many of the victims are vulnerable and in care and they are quite hard to support. Authorities are set up in a way that's not designed to support them in the way that they need.

5:15So we spoke to Chris Wilde, who is a care sector activist and an abuse survivor, and he describes the care system as at the precipice of collapsing. And that's why it's so easy for criminal gangs to get access to children. In London in particular, we have almost 10 ,000 children in care, more than anywhere else in the country. Some of the reports show that children are being placed miles and miles outside the capital, even as far away as Scotland sometimes. So they don't have any access to their support systems that they may have in London. And that makes it easier for them to be groomed and for predators to essentially get hold of them.

5:55The girls, they were often in care or had social service involvement in their lives in some way. Some had learning difficulties or special needs and then they were placed in homes that were miles away from any family members or friends they may have from their schools. And one girl you mention is Katie Alicia. Tell me more about her. She was actually a survivor of one of the Telford grooming gangs but she had moved to Essex to go to university and to study and she talked about how she had been kind of tricked into getting into a car with these guys and then was taken to a hotel room in London City.

6:34She said in hindsight looking back it was obvious what they were doing but at the time because she had faced all this abuse throughout her life as a young girl she didn't realise it she couldn't see it quite at the time and it wasn't until she was actually in the situation that she was in that she realised that she was in danger. She says looking back on it as an adult, she realises that she should have realised much earlier that she was perhaps being groomed. These girls are extremely young, often in vulnerable positions, often have not lived the best lives, maybe don't have a family support system.

7:07It's very easy for these gangs to get hold of them and to groom them. As I mentioned in the introduction earlier in the year, Sadiq Khan was questioned about grooming gangs and said the focus in the city was primarily on drug dealing gangs. What do you make of that? Definitely a problem in London. Criminal gangs grooming young boys to sell drugs, essentially, and they send them out to regional towns. And he was sort of accused of ignoring the sexual abuse element that many of these gangs are inflicting on girls and some boys as well. He said, we do have issues in London with young girls being groomed for county lines.

7:48Some of these girls are used for sex. And this was one of the reasons why I've set up things like the Lighthouse Project. That's a City Hall funded scheme that helps survivors of child sexual abuse in North London. And that's why he's investing in London's violence and exploitation support service. I think what's come out in recent weeks is that there is quite a significant problem, not just with county lines in drug dealing, but also with child sexual abuse in these gangs. The Mayor of London, when we spoke to his office, he's never denied that. He's always said that any individuals or gangs exploiting young women and girls for sex are utterly abhorrent and they must face the full force of the law.

8:23So who exactly are these gangs targeting young girls? When it's talked about, it's talked about in reference to the gangs that were operating in Bradford, Birmingham, Telford, those places where it was predominantly Pakistani men or British Pakistani men who were targeting white girls. All of the people we spoke to across authorities said that in London it is different. There is not one race or religion that is being targeted as victims and there is not one race or religion that are perpetrators either. Let's go to a break. Coming up in part two, how are these cases slipping through the net? And why isn't action being taken to stop this happening?

9:08We'll see you back here in just a moment. Welcome back. Rachel, something that is key to this story is what Baroness Louise Casey, a crossbench peer, discovered when she investigated this issue. Tell us more about that. And Baroness Louise Casey, she did a report earlier this year. So it was a government audit essentially into the grooming gang scandal. That came after there was suddenly a significant amount of media interest in it again, after people like Elon Musk started talking about it. And she found that there was a mismatch in the way that the Met and local authorities are recording child sexual abuse.

9:47She said the force was logging 2.77 contact child abuse cases per 1 ,000 children, while boroughs were recording just 1.3 in child in need assessments and 1.79 for child sexual abuse. So there is this problem, I think, between the way that authorities are talking to each other and recording cases. So you've got essentially victims falling through the cracks. And it also comes after the Met Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, last week told assembly members in City Hall that Scotland Yard had a steady flow of ongoing multi-offender child sexual exploitation investigations and a very significant number of allegations would need to be reopened because of the Home Office's grooming gangs reviewing.

10:30He also added that he would be loath to take child protection specialists away from dealing with the current caseloads, which are significant. So this is something that has been going on for many years and to go back and look at them again is going to cost a significant amount of money is what the Mayor Commissioner is saying and time And obviously, we know that the Met Police is already stretched. We know that social services departments are extremely stretched. And that has essentially led to a situation where you've got many vulnerable children in care that are very easy for gangs to target and manipulate.

11:06So what action has Keir Starmer taken? He announced there will be a National Grooming Gangs Inquiry. But this week, that has been thrown into a bit of chaos. The National Inquiry is yet to appoint its chair and four abuse survivors who were on the panel for the inquiry have this week quit. They've accused the Home Office of being condescending and not listening to them and said they were concerned about certain people from certain authorities, social workers and police, having big roles on the committee when obviously police and council and social service failings that led to the grooming gangs scandal in the first place.

11:47Keir Starmer defended the inquiry at Prime Minister's questions. He faced a lot of grilling from Kenny Badenock, the Tory leader, about what was going on and why these women were leaving the inquiry. He said that the inquiry will not be watered down, its scope will not change, it will examine the ethnicity and religion of the offenders and we will find the right person to chair it. He also said that Dame Louise Casey will support the work of the inquiry and get to the truth. There have been suggestions from the survivors who have left the inquiry that it was going to be watered down and essentially that the Home Office were not just focusing on grooming gangs and group-based child sexual abuse, they wanted to widen it out to more individual cases of sexual abuse.

12:38So he sort of shot down those comments and said this inquiry will get to the truth and he doesn't want to let victims down essentially. And what surprised you the most about this investigation? I think some of the reports that we uncovered have been really harrowing reading. One case from Lambeth, 17-year-old girl, She'd gone missing from care dozens of times. And during one of her missing episodes, she was discovered in a hotel room with six adult men having been plied with class A drugs and alcohol. Two men had raped her. There was suggestions that others had filmed the attack. And it goes through what her life was like.

13:20There were concerns about her and that she was a victim of child exploitation during missing episodes in school and her substance abuse. from the age of 13. So there was sort of four years between the first concerns about her being a victim of child exploitation and her being found in that hotel room with those six men. And police had charged an adult man was sexually exploiting her when she was 15 years old, but ultimately he was not convicted. And that experience of giving evidence had been extremely traumatic for her. And it accounts that she was placed in care as far away as Scotland. She'd been reported missing from care 59 times.

14:01And then we've got another one, Croydon, there was a girl who they could have been the name Chloe. These are not their real names, by the way. Chloe took her own life in a state of mental crisis when she was 17. But she first came to police and social service detention at 11 after she hadn't attended school for several months. She was assessed as being vulnerable to sexual exploitation. And before her 12th birthday, she disclosed being raped and tests showed that she had three sexually transmitted diseases. I mean, a trial into her rape, age 11, had concluded with a not guilty verdict. And the report just says the reasons for this outcome are unclear.

14:35There were quite a few cases like that where you just see these girls that were identified as potential victims of child sexual exploitation when they were very young. And yet years later, they were still in a situation where they were being exploited, You know, predators were able to get their hands on them. And these reports were only done after something truly horrific enough to trigger a multi-agency response and report was done. But you can see that there were so many incidences where they could have been helped more, where something could have been done and someone should have stepped in.

15:12And it wasn't just one or two, it was multiple over years and years and years. So this sounds like an enormous institutional failure then It is an institutional failure but it's not one institution They have been let down again and again and again by multiple agencies who should have supported them who should have stepped in and didn't for a multitude of reasons and I think that is what when we were speaking to people who work in these authorities and charities and lawyers who have represented victims they were saying that there is so many people involved in these cases that things just do fall through the cracks and there's not, you know, a single person to blame necessarily.

15:54It's just they're let down by everyone. There's been a lot of reporting about county lines drug gangs. And actually, what Sadiq Khan did say was right. There is a big problem in London when it comes to child exploitation. But what some of these drug gangs are doing as well is grooming girls for sex. at the same time they're grooming children to go and sell drugs for them.

16:19And that's The Standard. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. If you'd like to get in touch, please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk. We'll be back here tomorrow at 5pm. We'll see you then.