The chaos of the grooming gangs inquiry

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, how the grooming gang's inquiry became such a mess.

0:17...for the urgent question, to ask the Home Secretary to make a statement on the recent criticism of the statutory inquiry into the rape gang scandal. It was never going to be easy to run a national inquiry into a subject as contentious as so-called grooming gangs. It hasn't even started and already things seem to be going unusually badly. Survivors of child sexual abuse have quit the national inquiry into grooming gangs. Ellie Reynolds and Fiona Goddard resigned from the oversight panel. Last week, a group of survivors on the advisory panel quit. In my opinion, I think that this panel is aiming to prevent the truth from coming out about the fact that we do have grooming gangs in the country that are predominantly Asian, Pakistani men.

0:59They worried the inquiry was going to duck the hard questions. And were unhappy with the potential choices of chair. One, a former social worker, and the other, an ex-police officer. The main systems and institutes that consistently failed survivors over decades. Some called for the resignation of Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister in charge of the inquiry. But others said they would quit if Phillips was forced out. And this week, Nigel Farage decided to get involved, calling for MPs, of all people, to take the whole thing over and get it done and dusted by Christmas. It's time for Parliament to step up and to do its job.

1:40It's an almighty mess. An inquiry mistrusted by the very people it's set up to serve, with no chair, no terms of reference and no justice for victims who've already waited years, sometimes decades. Women now, girls then. Girls who were preyed on, coerced, manipulated and deceived into having sex with groups of older men. Girls who suffered beatings, gang rapes. Girls having to have abortions, contracting sexually transmitted infections, having children removed from them at birth. Why can't we get this right? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus. Can the grooming gang inquiry get back on track?

2:29Geraldine McKelvie, you're a senior correspondent at The Guardian and this is your first time on Today in Focus. So thanks for making the time for us. Thanks for having me. And you've written extensively on grooming gangs over the past decade or so. And you've got particular interest in this area, haven't you? Tell me about that. So I started working on this story in 2014, just after the J report came out in Rotherham. And I worked with a survivor in Rotherham, an amazing woman called Sarah Wilson. And we did a book together about her experiences as a victim of grooming in Rotherham. And through that, I was led to another victim of grooming in Telford who uses a pseudonym, Collie Archer.

3:04And we also produced a book together. And when I was researching Holly's book, I realised there was a lot of things about child sexual exploitation in Telford which hadn't come out, which hadn't kind of been pieced together. The most worrying thing was that some girls who appeared to be victims of CSE had lost their lives. One girl, Lucy Lowe, who had been made pregnant at 14, one of her abusers, Azar Ali Mehmed, had burned down her house, killed her, her sister and her mum. There was another victim who'd been run over, another victim who'd died in a drugs incident, and these were all things that were connected to the abuse that they'd suffered.

3:40God, and it was your reporting on Telford that ultimately led to an inquiry in the town, wasn't it? And it was led by a judge and he found that more than a thousand children, mostly girls, had been sexually exploited and groomed in the town Yeah, so one of the things that came out of the Telford report was that a nervousness about race had been one of the reasons why they hadn't responded adequately to some reports of child sexual exploitation and grooming and through my work in Telford I have looked at this issue in other areas, child sexual exploitation and grooming and obviously it's a hugely complex area.

4:16It takes many forms and there's many victims of many different experiences and I think that's the point we're at now. We're just trying to wrestle with all of that complexity. And you've used the term child sexual exploitation. Is that the same as grooming? Let's just get the language straight here. What are we talking about? Yeah, that's a good question. And I think that's one that has led to a lot of the debate over the last weeks and months over what this inquiry should focus on. So child sexual exploitation takes many forms. Sometimes it's a one on one thing. Sometimes it's in groups. And grooming is sort of the process which leads a victim's vulnerability to be exploited that then brings them to becoming a victim of sexual offences.

4:57There is a big debate over what a grooming gang actually is, what constitutes a grooming gang. That's a very difficult question to answer. Is it street-based grooming? Can it be when the first contact has been online but then more people, more perpetrators get involved? It's a hugely complex question that lots of people are wrestling with at the moment. And I think that's why over the last week we've had such debate over this inquiry and what its focus should be. And the question of what a grooming gang is, is actually not that simple, is it? And when I think back to the last case that I covered as North of England editor before moving to today in focus, it involved a girl from Rochdale who had been exploited by 50 men from the age of 12.

5:39So many men that there's multiple trials, they haven't all happened yet. But in the first trial, five men were convicted and they weren't a gang in any formal sense, like they didn't sit around plotting and planning. And one of them, the one white guy, as it happens, he didn't know the other four at all. And the other four were essentially a bunch of mates. Two of them were brothers. Most of them were teenagers at the time. And they thought nothing of passing around this underage girl between them, giving her drink and drugs and so forth. And this abuse, her abuse, began in 2002, and it took more than 20 years to finally reach court, which I think shows just how long and messy this story is.

6:30In June this year, Keir Starmer announced that he was going to order a national inquiry into group-based child sexual exploitation, aka grooming. And it was something that he'd resisted for quite a long time, wasn't it? Why did he change his mind in June? The context to this is on New Year's Day, GB News broke a story and the story was that the safeguarding minister Jess Phillips had written to Oldham Council and said that the Home Office wouldn't fund a statutory inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham and that is something that some victims in Oldham had been calling for. And in a way it wasn't really a very surprising response because what she said in the letter was it's for Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry locally rather than for the government to intervene.

7:13That has been the attitude of central government throughout the whole of this scandal. When the Conservatives were in power for 14 years that was the advice that they continually gave to local authorities. What had changed? What had made GB News and others start talking about the need for Well, GB News did quite a straight story on New Year's Day, just saying, publishing the contents of the letter from Jess Phillips to Oldham Council. That was then seized upon by Elon Musk, who began to tweet about it. Rare is the episode of Today in Focus that doesn't somehow touch on him. So he stuck his oar in on Twitter.

7:47Yeah, so I think Elon Musk has seized on the race element of some of these cases. And obviously several inquiries found that a nervousness around race was a reason that things weren't perhaps adequately investigated or it hampered the response in some way. And I think that he said some quite incendiary things. Elon Musk, who blamed years of inaction on the Prime Minister and called Home Office Minister Jess Phillips a rape genocide apologist. He tweeted that Jess Phillips should be in prison for refusing the inquiry. And his posts, obviously, as the owner of X, he's got millions of followers. They very quickly went viral.

8:25And this was then quite quickly catapulted to the top of the news agenda and became a topic of national conversation once again. And I remember at the time, Starmer was pretty robust in his response to calls from the likes of Elon Musk and indeed Tommy Robinson. But when the poison of the far right leads to serious threats to Jess Phillips and others, then in my book, a line has been crossed. He even accused people of jumping on a far right bandwagon, which makes it in some ways all the more surprising that he changed his mind come June. So what happened between January and June? So what happened then was he asked Louise Casey, who is a senior chival servant who has looked at lots of different issues in Whitehall.

9:08Yeah, if you've got a problem, you call Louise Casey, she'll come and sort it out. Well, the background to this is Louise Casey had looked very specifically at Rotherham in 2015. And he asked Louise Casey to do an audit of what the issues were around this. And I think she was looking at the picture sort of nationally and would there be merit in having a national inquiry into the sort of group based child sexual exploitation? And the conclusion that she came to was that there should be a national inquiry. Right. And one of the things the inquiry will look at is whether certain ethnicities, and I'm thinking particularly of Pakistani or British Pakistani men, whether they are overrepresented as perpetrators.

9:46And if so, why? And this is something that's been a concern for a long time now. Certainly since 2014 at least when the Jay report came out in Rotherham and found that 1 ,400 mostly white girls in Rotherham had been exploited by men, mostly of British Pakistani origin. But I think with the audit that she carried out this year, she flagged that there's a pretty serious problem with the data that's been collected historically, didn't she? Data on this is woefully inadequate. Police forces haven't kept robust data on this issue. So when Louise Casey looked back at, she looked at three force areas, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire, I think.

10:24In those cases, it appeared that offenders from Asian heritage backgrounds were overrepresented. But what she did, she was very careful to stress, was that in two thirds of cases, there was no data on this. So it becomes extremely difficult to paint an accurate national picture without that data. That is something that I think when the National Inquiry does start, it will be really, really difficult, especially looking back at cases going back 20, 30 years, if that data doesn't exist. Of course. And it might be important to make clear at this point that less than 5 % of all child abuse crimes involve groups of perpetrators.

11:03But as you've already touched on, there have already been a number of local inquiries into this issue. I think there have been 10 in total. How is this national inquiry going to be any different? The way it was set up was as a targeted local investigations with statutory powers. The main thing that statutory powers means is that they can summon witnesses to give evidence under oath. And I think in a lot of cases, that's people like police officers, social workers, people who were involved in making decisions about these children and failed them, essentially. When we saw in Telford, there was a handful of quite key witnesses who were asked to come and give evidence and decided not to.

11:41But Tom Crowther, the former judge who chaired the Telford inquiry, made quite an important point about statutory powers and they're not a silver bullet. You can force people to come to an inquiry and give evidence but it doesn't guarantee that they will give you good evidence, especially when we're looking at things going back 20, 30 years.

12:08Louise Casey promised, didn't she, that victims, survivors were going to be at the heart of all this. So what have they been doing behind the scenes in the past couple of months before it all blew up in the news? Yeah, so what happened was they decided to get a panel together of 30 survivors who had all suffered some form of group-based sexual exploitation. So I think that it had to be people who'd suffered group or gang-based sexual exploitation. And all of those survivors were put onto a panel where they could express opinions about who the chair might be, where they could ask questions to prospective chairs and they could also make suggestions for the terms of reference.

12:43And the panel, I understand, has been managed by the child sexual exploitation charity, the NWG Network. Right, OK. So there's this panel of 30 survivors all being consulted on what the inquiry should do and who should chair it. And ultimately, what is the end goal? Is it all about righting historical wrongs and maybe seeing abusers, perpetrators put behind bars as well as potentially the people in authority who have failed these victims? Or is it more about the future and making sure that this sort of thing can't happen again? Well, one key thing to make clear is that inquiry will not have any powers to conduct criminal prosecutions.

13:21So it won't have any powers to put people on trial, whether that be offenders or potentially professionals who've committed some kind of misconduct. It won't result directly in anybody going to jail. but what it might do is it's working alongside I think a police investigation which is looking at historic child sexual exploitation. This is Operation Beacon Port. Yes that's right. So it might help to inform police investigations that might run parallel to it but the inquiry in itself will not see anybody. It won't have the powers to prosecute anybody. I think it will be looking at what happened and what failures were there and what lessons might be learned from those failures to try and ensure that going forward, children are better protected.

14:04OK, and Louise Casey has already said that she doesn't want the inquiry to last any longer than three years. She's no doubt mindful of just how long the independent child abuse inquiry lasted, which was seven years. And that inquiry, which finished in 2023, had a much broader scope. But perhaps surprisingly, looking back, it didn't actually go into any great detail about grooming. and meanwhile you have grooming survivors waiting years, decades sometimes for justice and you can certainly understand why they are impatient but also why they are fearful and suspicious about the inquiry given how many times they were ignored, blamed, punished often, even criminalised when they told people in authority what was going on.

14:48Yes, well there are failed in so many ways. I think that you mentioned survivors being criminalised and people might remember from 2017 the BBC drama Three Girls. The Crown listed you alongside the men on a charge of conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with the child. What that means is that you were as responsible as the men. One of the really horrific details that emerged and later became a focus of the drama was that one girl who had introduced other girls to her abuser was put in a criminal indictment alongside the perpetrators. And that is something I think has had lifelong consequences for her.

15:30I think the drama showed that it led social services to get involved with her children. So she was accused of sort of being a pimp, kind of facilitating the abuse, yeah, by bringing her friends into the ring. Yeah, exactly. And I think she was a child herself, she was a victim herself, and she, alongside the men who were ultimately convicted of this in Watchdale, she was put alongside them on the indictment. you know others ended up with criminal records for things like prostitution and I've I've looked at so many cases where I can see where teenage girls have got caught records for things like prostitution or or child abduction for taking younger children along and things but the but the perpetrators of abuse the offenders have walked free they've they've you know there's been complete impunity for them and I just one really shocking example that I have come across in my reporting of this is one child a 12 year old child went to a police station to report a sexual assault and she wasn't taken seriously.

16:20Not only was she not taken seriously, she was encouraged to go home, take a lift home from two people at the police station, two men who then trafficked her around the town to experience further abuse. And that is just the most damning indictment of how these girls were seen and how this was treated.

16:47Yeah, and the way in which these girls were treated by police officers, social workers and so far can help us to understand a little bit why there's been such controversy over who should chair this inquiry. As you've said, there's a panel of 30 survivors, all of whom have suffered group-based abuse, and they have been behind the scenes looking at who should chair this inquiry. And this has been a real source of contention, hasn't it? So, yeah, the two frontrunners to chair this inquiry were Jim Gamble, who's a former senior police officer, and Annie Hudson, who's a former senior social worker.

17:20I think she was director of children's services at several councils in England. And both have withdrawn from the process. I think there was some concern from some survivors that the police and social work had failed them quite badly in the past. It's difficult, isn't it? Because in some ways they're perfectly placed to chair the inquiry because they understand the police and social services. But at the same time, you can definitely see both sides of the argument. And it's a really difficult one to wrestle with. What some survivors have said is that they would like a leading legal figure to chair the inquiry.

17:50Judge. Former judge, judge or a leading KCE. but I think the issue has been that there hasn't been a wealth of people putting their names forward from that world. You know there hasn't been an overwhelming number of leading lawyers want to throw their hat in the ring for this. Why is that do you think? Alexis Jay has said before I think that she obviously chaired ICSA which went on for seven years. Which is the child abuse inquiry. Yes and neither the Conservatives nor Labour have implemented the vast majority of the recommendations from ICSA so I think that among the legal profession there might be an attitude that I could give up years of my life to this and it could, you know, will anything result from it?

18:28Will it actually make a difference? And I think it would be, you know, difficult, I think, to find somebody that is acceptable to everybody. And I think whoever has chosen to chair it, there might have to be some compromises. Right. And as well as deciding who the chair should be, the oversight group of survivors were also involved of deciding, agreeing the scope of this inquiry. and this has become a really thorny topic as well hasn't it? Yes. So from what I understand from what the government associates have said about this and I don't obviously know the identity of everybody on the panel but I understand that of the 30 people on the panel they all have suffered some form of group based abuse but I think there's quite a range of experiences within that and I think that the issue is how to define what this inquiry should look at and what groups might fall into the definition of being a grooming gang and that's a really, really, really difficult thing to define.

19:22And earlier this month, survivors started to raise their concerns about the direction of the inquiry. Tell me about that. How did it all start to unravel? So I think the National Working Group, who have obviously been given the responsibility of overseeing the panel, sent out a questionnaire, and I think it asked, should the inquiry focus on grooming gangs specifically or take a broader approach in looking at child sexual exploitation and abuse? And I think for some people who wanted it to be sort of laser focused on, you know, these street grooming gangs, that was a concern to them. Well, they thought it was being watered down too much.

19:57Yes, I think that seems to have been the catalyst for what we saw last week. Some of the survivors on the panel decided to withdraw. If my voice isn't going to be heard while I'm on the panel, I'll make sure it's heard outside it. Some publicly, some weren't, but there were several survivors decided to withdraw from that process. And the question about widening the scope seems to have been the catalyst for these resignations, for these survivors withdrawn from the process. And as you said, some of these women had waived their anonymity as any victim of sexual abuse or sexual violence is automatically entitled to anonymity under the law in England and Wales.

20:35But one of the women, Ellie Anne Reynolds, who suffered abuse in Barrow in Cumbria, She's one of the women who resigned and she said she felt the inquiry was becoming less about truth and more about cover-up. And Fiona Goddard, another survivor who quit the panel, said she feared the remit of the inquiry was being watered down. How did the government respond? The safeguarded minister, Jess Phillips, in Parliament had sought to say that there wasn't an attempt to dilute it, that it would still be focused on grooming gangs, and then confusion reigned. Allegations of intentional delay, lack of interest, or widening of the inquiry's scope and dilution are false.

21:16The inquiry will remain laser-focused on grooming gangs, as Baroness Casey recommends. It was interesting if you watched Jess Phillips in Parliament. She was pretty robust when she was responding to the Tories and the suggestion that the inquiry was somehow compliciting a kind of cover-up or that she wasn't the right person. The level of bad faith, the idea that it's easy to find a chair or easy to find people who want to step forward and take part in this process when it is mired in, I have to say, political point scoring like he just did. So you've got this group of survivors. I think initially there were four women who quit and said they didn't have any confidence in the inquiry.

22:04What do you say to Jess Phillips, the minister who's leading this? I think she needs to step down because she's... But this is a group of 30 survivors who are on the panel. They're not all of the same mind, are they? Well, that's the thing. It would be foolish to think that any group of survivors would present as a monolith, if you know what I mean. There's going to be a huge range of opinions, there's going to be a huge range of lived experiences, there's going to be a huge range of outlooks. So I was sent a letter on Thursday and that was from a group of survivors who actually were quite supportive of Jess Phillips' leadership.

22:36And I think that the letter reflected that they felt Jess Phillips had dedicated her life to helping women and girls who'd been through sexual violence and that behind the scenes she was helping survivors to access services they wouldn't otherwise have access to. And they thought she was the best placed minister to take forward the inquiry and they didn't want her to resign. In fact, they said, if she resigns, we don't want to continue with the process because there won't be the consistency that we've had before. and the other thing that they were concerned about was that if the inquiry has too narrow a focus they were worried that it might discourage people who actually do have relevant evidence from coming forward if that makes sense.

23:14Such a mess isn't it? So on the one hand you've got people calling for Jess Phillips to go then you've got five survivors saying no, if she goes we're off people arguing about the terms of reference, who should chair it where do we go from here? I think that the next thing we have to do is really take a step back I can think carefully about candidates for chair and who might be willing to do it and who would be qualified to do it and who they think would do a good job, who the survivors would trust because trust is really important when it comes to this kind of thing. But after the two leading candidates had both withdrawn, government sources indicated that it could take months to find a new chair and there haven't been any names put forward so far, so we'll have to wait to see what names emerge.

24:00Coming up, Nigel Farage accuses some of the survivors of not really being grooming victims.

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