What the grooming-gangs inquiry needs to ask

Keir Starmer was left with no choice but to commit to a national statutory inquiry into the grooming-gangs scandal, following the publication of Louise Casey’s damning national audit last month. This inquiry is long overdue and it is vital that no stone is left unturned in the search for truth.

The earlier reluctance to even hold an inquiry was undoubtedly due to the racial sensitivities involved. The UK prime minister and much of the establishment have long been unwilling to acknowledge the backgrounds of many of the perpetrators. But Casey’s report surely points to a pattern that no inquiry can ignore.

While the report flagged the variety of nationalities and ethnicities involved in grooming-gang activity (including Angolan, Bangladeshi, Bengali, Bulgarian, Congolese, Eritrean, Indian, Iranian, Jamaican, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Somali, Syrian and Zimbabwean), it noted that, where data are available, there is a disproportionate number of Pakistani heritage men. This has certainly been the case in hotspots of grooming-gang activity, such as Rotherham and Telford. Similar patterns have emerged in Birmingham, Oxford and Huddersfield, among other cities and towns. A 2020 review into Operation Augusta, which was shut down prematurely by Greater Manchester Police in 2005, found that it was also investigating perpetrators who overwhelmingly belonged to the local Pakistani-origin population.

Of course, we should guard against picking on any particular ethnic group when it comes to the horrors of grooming-gang activity, which in some cases has involved the kind of depraved violence that wouldn’t be out of place in a warzone. But we must not shy away from the growing body of research pointing to men of Pakistani heritage being heavily involved in such sexual crimes against children. An early example of this was a 2020 study by professors Kish Bhatti-Sinclair and Charles Sutcliffe, which concluded that men of Pakistani Muslim origin dominate prosecutions for what they referred to as ‘group-localised child sexual exploitation’.

The reality is that grooming-gang activity has thrived in parts of the country where significant Pakistani-Mirpuri populations can be found near white British communities plagued by social breakdown and economic deprivation. We need to ask what role ‘biraderi’ clans play in this. These are tight-knit, multi-generational networks, often reinforced by cousin marriage. They are bound by cultural codes of honour, secrecy and self-protection.

The power of these clans speaks to a spectacular integration failure and exposes the more sinister side of multicultural Britain. This simply must be investigated as a potential driver of grooming-gang activity in the inquiry.

As Britain’s demographic composition and immigration patterns have diversified over the years, so too have the ethnicities and nationalities involved in grooming gangs. In some cases, there have been multi-ethnic grooming gangs who have preyed on vulnerable underage girls. The ongoing small-boats emergency has further complicated matters, with Casey’s report flagging the connection between illegal migration and grooming-gang activity. The role of migration policy must therefore also be explored.

Most victims of grooming gangs were white, working-class young girls. The inquiry must ask whether this led to them being targeted. Reports suggest that some perpetrators considered the girls to be ‘fair game’ because they were white, British and non-Muslim. This is another important dimension in which these crimes may have been racially or religiously motivated.

It is imperative that any national public inquiry into grooming gangs is not a whitewash that focusses solely on ‘institutional failures’. While determining institutional and individual complicity is important, it is also vital to understand the ethnic and religious composition of Britain’s grooming gangs. We must know how they are formed, how they develop, and how they grow over time. Investigating these things may be unpalatable for the politically correct. But there is no space for sensitivities when it comes to delivering justice for the victims of this horrific sexual criminality and to preventing such horrors from ever happening again.

A national inquiry into grooming gangs is long overdue. But it will be pointless if it is not robust, thorough and comprehensive. It must not duck the hard questions that the establishment won’t want to ask.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.