A dangerous silence

Whenever a Hollywood actress complains about some lecherous man, there’s blanket coverage. Even our MPs feel the need to tut. So why, when there are allegations involving 1,000 underage girls abused by child-grooming gangs in this country, does no one turn a hair? For the most part, the paedophile scandal in Telford was ignored by the people who should care most.

The BBC, which has devoted hour upon hour to the #MeToo movement since the allegations over Harvey Weinstein broke last year, initially did not even think it worth covering the Telford abuse story on the section of its website devoted to news from Shropshire, let alone the national news. In the House of Commons, after the news broke, ‘urgent questions’ were being asked in the Commons chamber about the potential bullying of Westminster researchers. The fate of Telford girls, uncovered by the Sunday Mirror, was relegated to the junior chamber in Westminster Hall.

It’s true the news has always tended to focus on the interests and preoccupations of the powerful and well-connected — and Telford is a far cry from Westminster. But there is another reason why the story made no waves. The alleged perpetrators fit a pattern of offending which was evident in the Rochdale and Rotherham scandals: they are predominantly Asian men targeting predominantly white girls, often in care, some terribly young. As Alexis Jay wrote in her 2014 report into the Rotherham scandal, plenty was known about what was going on; yet ‘several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.’

The same stories are now emerging about Telford. One victim has said that she was raped so often in her early teenage years that she visited a clinic twice a week for three years to pick up the morning-after pill.