It has now been six weeks since the inquiry into ‘Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse’ fell into chaos. Over the course of a several days numerous survivors quit – claiming that the civil servants running the process were seeking to dilute the inquiry – and the man being considered as chair stood down. Since then there has been silence from the government. There is still no chair nor terms of reference.
It is important that we all understand the sheer evil of what has been done and what has been hidden from us by the state
This is despite Louise Casey’s damning report in June, which revealed the sheer scale of these gangs and the ‘significantly disproportionate over-representation of suspects of Asian ethnicity’ in the cases she examined. Casey was explicit about the fact that these crimes were covered-up, and the reasons why. She described how she ‘heard from police forces that local authorities would discourage them from publicising the successful conviction of perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation due to fears of raising tensions’. Many organisations avoided ‘the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist, raising community tension or causing community cohesion problems’. In short, the state covered up the mass rape of white and Sikh girls by gangs of mostly Muslim men. It did this because it cares more about ‘community relations’ than the rape of children.
Thankfully we aren’t solely reliant on the government to expose the horrors committed by the rape gangs. Open Justice, an organisation funded entirely by donations, has begun publishing transcripts from rape gang trials.
They are doing this with the support of victims and survivors. Fiona Goddard is a victim of these rape gangs. She has asked for her case transcripts to be published in full by Open Justice. She told me that ‘these transcripts are so important to gain a proper understanding of the scale of failings, size of networks and severity of abuse involved… in these crimes’. Fiona also explained that the transcripts often contain details even the victims were unaware of, saying ‘there are multiple things in my transcripts that I would never even have known of if it wasn’t for Open Justice helping me in getting access to them.’
This has not been an easy task. To begin with, the organisation found there wasn’t even a national map of these crimes. Then, once they began to apply for copies of court transcripts, a perfectly normal act under our law, Open Justice encountered resistance.
Adam Wren, director of Open Justice told me they ‘faced months-long delays from courts, applications routinely lost, unfounded rejections from judges, and court recordings, often stored as tapes, going missing or being destroyed making some transcripts impossible to obtain. Even when permission was granted, government-contracted transcription agencies wouldn’t respond. Basic details needed for applications were impossible to find in many cases’.
It appears some people still want to keep these crimes quiet. When you read the transcripts, which you should, you will understand why. The details are horrifying. I am going to describe some of them because it is important that we all understand the sheer evil of what has been done, what has been hidden from us by the state, and what it still seeks to hide from us.
Take just one transcript, that of a 2013 trial in Oxford. We learn of how young, vulnerable girls, were repeatedly raped by ‘vast numbers of strangers’, brought from ‘Bradford, Leeds, Slough and London’. Cigarettes were used to burn the girls. They were penetrated violently with objects. The rape gang perpetrators were often close relatives of one another – in Oxford the Dogar brothers were the leaders of a rape gang.
The rape was often explicitly about race. In Rotherham in 2016, judge Sarah Wright was sentencing Arshid Hussain for his rape of a girl who had been abused by various other men since the age of seven. The judge described how Hussain ‘forced her to her knees calling her a white bitch and trash telling her that Asian women didn’t perform oral sex as it was against their religion’.
Often the police knew, and did nothing. Indeed, Fiona Goddard told me that she believes the ‘stigma’ around victims of these crimes was ‘pushed by authorities’. One transcript describes how in 2001, aged 12, a victim ‘told the police the names of some men’ she had been raped by. It would take more than a decade before action was taken.
As Adam Wren says, the transcripts ‘document horrific crimes against children. The detailed patterns of offending, the trafficking between towns, the failures of authorities, all of this needs to be in the public domain. This scandal persisted for so long because people could turn a blind eye out of ignorance. Care workers, government officials, and the public need to understand the unique nature of these crimes to prevent them happening again’.
Wren is right, to an extent. We do all need to understand the true nature and scale of these crimes. We need to recognise that vast numbers of white girls, all across the country have been raped, abused and tortured. We need to recognise that these crimes have gone on for decades – I have seen newspaper reports going back to the 1970s – and that the number of victims may be in the hundreds of thousands. We need to recognise that this appears to have been done by gangs, or clans of Muslim men who are often related. We need to recognise that these crimes were often explicitly racist. So we need the genuine, inquisitorial inquiry we have been promised, with the ability to compel testimony and force the production of evidence.
We need to face what has been done to our children. We also need justice. These are uniquely evil crimes. No jail sentence is enough. So we must meet these crimes with our own Nuremberg. Those public servants who hid or excused the crimes must face forfeiture of honours, pensions and assets, along with very long prison sentences.
And every member of these rape gangs must be found, whether or not they have already been prosecuted. When they are found guilty, capital punishment must be imposed. This will require special legislation – but these crimes are so vast, and so terrible that nothing else will grant the victims justice and our nation peace.
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