Grooming-gang victims deserved better than Restore’s botched inquiry

The independent ‘Rape Gang Inquiry’, set up by Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe, published its report last week. So did it add anything fresh to our collective understanding of grooming-gang activity or shed new light on the factors driving this decades-long, nationwide scourge?

Credit should certainly be given to the inquiry for thrusting grooming-gang activity, formally known as group-localised child sexual exploitation (GLCSE), back into the spotlight. And the survivors who contributed their testimonies to the inquiry – describing the torture, abuse and exploitation they endured – are deserving of the utmost admiration.

Furthermore, Restore’s inquiry has at least injected some urgency into proceedings. The UK government’s own national statutory inquiry into grooming-gang activity – reluctantly being held by the Labour government after it was recommended by Baroness Louise Casey in her national audit – is moving at a glacial pace. Restore has reminded us that Britain needs to face up to these horrific, unspeakable crimes against some of the most vulnerable and exposed members of our society, and explore the institutional mismanagement and neglect that allowed it to happen.

However, the report has not gone down as well as its authors may have hoped – even among those who have a proven track record of highlighting the horrors of grooming-gang criminality. Much of this criticism stems from the nature of the inquiry. It already had no statutory powers to compel witnesses to attend and provide evidence under oath. And it compounded these limitations by proceeding with no clearly defined objectives or ‘terms of reference’.

The report itself provides little in the way of fresh insight. It fails to dig into the scale of this nationwide epidemic or explore the societal, cultural and economic drivers of grooming-gang activity. Instead, the report is overly reliant on the victims’ admittedly harrowing testimonies. These then form the basis for what often amounts to pseudo-intellectual analysis. Much of the report reads more like punditry than a genuine examination of how these vile paedophilic crimes have been allowed to take place over decades.

The report is simply not a credible piece of research. Some of it is closer to anti-Muslim slop. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the ‘influence of Islam’ in the context of grooming-gang activity. It is true, as academics Kish Bhatti-Sinclair and Charles Sutcliffe argue in their 2020 paper on GLCSE (which was not cited at all in the rape-gang inquiry report), that Muslims dominate grooming-gang prosecutions. But they clearly show that it is specifically Pakistani Muslims originating from the Mirpur district of Azad Kashmir who comprise the vast majority of perpetrators. As they put it in their analysis of GLCSE prosecutions in local areas, ‘the proportion of the local population of Pakistani origin is more powerful in explaining the level of GLCSE than the Muslim proportion’. By the same token, the proportion of Bangladeshi-origin people (overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim) in an area had no effect on the level of GLCSE, in their analysis.

While it may be tempting for some on the radical right to exaggerate the role of Islam in the context of grooming-gang activity, it doesn’t do them any favours. The tight-knit, biraderi-style multi-generational kinship networks (reinforced by cousin marriage) and the patriarchal clan structures dominant within certain British-Pakistani communities seem to have played a far greater role than religion. These kinship and clan structures provide the bonds of secrecy and mutual protection that allow such large grooming gangs to operate undetected.

It is also somewhat baffling that Bradford is barely mentioned in the report. It should have been a case study in its own right, especially since previous local investigations into grooming-gang activity in the city have been threadbare at best. What needs to be thoroughly investigated is not only how these child-abuse networks operate within communities, but also how they were allowed to do so by public institutions – including local councils, police forces, schools, social services and safeguarding partnerships.

Tellingly, grooming-gang convictions involving non-Muslim criminal enterprises receive no mention whatsoever. Hence the exclusion of the Romanian grooming gang jailed last October for raping and sexually abusing 10 women in flats across Dundee in Scotland.

The Rape Gang Inquiry was a golden opportunity for fresh and hard-hitting insights on grooming-gang activity. It had the potential to be a serious and illuminating piece of work. Unfortunately, as someone who wanted this to be the case, the report has proven a profound disappointment.

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