FINALLY!

FINALLY!

Finally – FINALLY – I have something to live for: reading the final national report on the statutory grooming gangs inquiry just announced by the PM (ahead of this week’s Casey report recommending this) which should be published ….ooh, I dunno …. anything from 7 to 10 years hence. Or longer.

Starmer seems unable to think more than one step ahead. Bizarre for a lawyer. It is one thing good lawyers should be able to do and having worked on the restructuring of the NI Police Service and as DPP he should surely have some political antennae. He had a good record as DPP on this. He could have got one over on the Tories who did damn all and threw the IICSA report into the long grass. He could have got credit for getting ahead of others by dealing with an appalling scandal instead of having to react to someone else telling him what to do. He commissioned the Casey Report but his inability to explain what he is doing and why, letting Jess Phillips give an incoherent explanation for why only local inquiries were needed which made her look bad then and worse now (a touch of Johnson’s leadership – ahem – skills there) makes it look as if he resisted then U-turned when pushed. He could have used it as a way of getting rid of some of the unsavoury characters in his own party ie those who turned a blind eye for ignoble reasons or out of cowardice (as Chris Mullin, writing in 2003, admitted in his diaries). He has a large majority after all. And it would have made him look as someone who cared about the vulnerable, especially from communities who feel ignored and despised. Also he would be unlikely to be PM when the report is published so it would be someone else’s problem.

Instead he comes across as someone who can only react (just as he needed the Supreme Court to tell him what “sex” and a “woman” mean), is politically maladroit, cannot take advantage of obvious opportunities and allows his political opponents to make the running. Not for the first time, his communications strategy is dreadful. Is there no-one sensible advising him?

Three things to watch: (1) the person heading the inquiry (there were 3 before Baroness Jay was appointed head of IICSA), (2) whether they manage to find someone competent with iron in their soul, who knows what they’re talking about and without a conflict of interest; and (3) the Terms of Reference and what is excluded (expect the Home Office to perform their dark arts here).

I’ll summarise the conclusions for you now. 

1. Lots of people knew or suspected, especially among those authorities responsible for the girls’ care. 
2. Some of them – in the police (several S Yorkshire policemen are being investigated for alleged rapes of groomed girls), among councillors and others – likely benefited (by being paid in money or services in kind or by not having to deal with a difficult, expensive issue).
3. No-one had the courage to do anything. They will blame a lack of procedures but that’s a convenient excuse. It was a lack of basic moral courage.
4. Some women professionals and many of the girls’ mothers spoke up. They were ignored because they were women. And what they said was inconvenient.
5. Lots of people believed in sexual autonomy and choice and children’s rights and because their brains – such as they were – had fallen out of their ears, they forgot – or ignored – that these were children, there is an age of consent and sex under it – especially with men twice or more a girl’s age is statutory rape – and there is a reason why the age of consent exists. It is a safeguard. Or meant to be. But it is not taken seriously – other than as a procedure to be ticked – and was coupled with a lack of curiosity about why so many young girls had so many much older “boyfriends” and little understanding of power relations between the sexes and coercive behaviour.
6. Snobbery about and contempt for poor, troubled, inarticulate, difficult girls and their unfashionable families living in unfashionable places was one of the reasons the authorities did nothing for so long. It is not just opportunities which are affected by your class in this country.
7. Dealing with this was too much like hard work.
8. A refusal to confront the attitudes towards women in migrant/religious communities, a fear of the racism card being used and not wanting to help the “far right” made the issue worse – a repeat in essence of the dreadful appeasement which occurred after the Rushdie fatwa (see Kenan Malik’s excellent book “From Fatwa to Jihad” which explains how some of those communities came to believe they could police themselves, would not be troubled over much by external enforcement and could use racism accusations/respect for different “cultures” as shields to avoid scrutiny).
9. A widespread and continuing failure to take sexual abuse of children seriously. See the number of middle aged men, often professionals, convicted of possession of some of the vilest CSA pictures who never get sent to prison and whose behaviour is explained away as caused by “stress“. 
10. Those who failed in their duties became more concerned with protecting themselves from blame the more this became an issue. Cover ups are the default response in a state and organisations which have not learnt that early investigation and action are always the better – and cheaper – option, even for those who have made a mess of things so far. The British state (the Treasury) is a true believer in false economies early on and pointlessly expensive consultants decades later. This suits those working for those consultancies and those flogging their public sector “experience” to them but no-one else.

Plus the usual lack of resources, blah blah.

The cultural consequences are potentially awful. The evidence will likely reinforce a belief that too many of our institutions are simply not up to their jobs, despite the efforts of many individuals working in them. The scale is so great that it becomes numbing and so societies become paralysed into inaction. Whether this becomes another difficult issue kicked into the long grass or a genuine attempt to find out what happened and why and learn …. (you know the rest) is open to question. If you want to bet on this, remember this: since the Everard murder, the number of arrests and prosecutions for indecent exposure has gone down despite it being an obvious red flag for more serious offences, its role in Couzens’ behaviour, what two reports said and all the Met’s promises. (See here for what girls feel about this crime and wonder why it’s still not taken seriously.)

There is a migrant/cultural/religious issue here. But don’t let that blind you to the fact that there are plenty of white men whose issue with what happened is not that girls were being abused but who was doing the abusing ie for some it’s a fight between different groups of men as to whom the girls belonged to and could be used/abused by. Scepticism about how genuinely concerned for the girls some of those complaining about this issue really are is warranted. They have been noticeably silent when it was happening in schools, care homes, churches, sports bodies and so on. Beams and motes apply here. It is not as if our society’s attitude to the sexual abuse and harassment of girls by people who are not migrants is impeccable. Unisex loos and changing rooms in schools are in breach of applicable laws and increase the incidence of sexual offences and harassment of girls but have been mandated by those who should know better. Joined-up evidence-based thinking and action in compliance with the law continues to be a mystery to our bureaucrats and legislators. No-one seems to care about how women and girls in migrant communities are treated by those abusing white girls. Nor about girls trafficked here from other countries to be abused. Nor about the sexual abuse of boys. Safeguarding is seen too often as unnecessary regulation rather than decent adults looking out for our children, all of them. The images and behaviours promoted to girls and how men and boys should treat them are often lacking any sense of respect, decency or self-restraint – let alone understanding of how to care for those who are not emotionally mature, vulnerable and dependant on adults for advice, protection and a willingness to say “No“. When dramas and documentaries were made, quite as horrifying as Mr Bates vs the Post Office (the BBC’s Three Girls or Channel 4’s “Groomed: A National Scandal” by Anna Hall, whose first documentary on this was in 2004) the response was tumbleweed. A few months ago Starmer’s government refused to go ahead with the compensation scheme for England and Wales recommended by IICSA, as there was no money. Now that, per the very same Mr Starmer, the economy has been fixed perhaps this money-saving decision can be reversed too.

There. If someone could send me a fraction of the millions they’ll spend on the inquiry, that’d be nice.

Cyclefree

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