Thank God for Katie Lam. Yesterday the government tried to conduct a grubby betrayal of thousands of young girls groomed and raped in towns and cities across the country. On the last day parliament sat before the Easter recess, Jess Phillips, the junior minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls spoke to an almost empty Commons to update MPs on the government’s plans to deal with ‘grooming gangs’. Few MPs were present.
Phillips assured her colleagues that Labour are developing ‘a new best practice framework to support local authorities that want to undertake… local inquiries’. A meagre £5 million will be available for local authorities should they wish to investigate organised child rape clans in their areas. Everything is to be ‘locally-led’. Phillips promised codes of practice, audits and schemes, but no statutory national inquiry into these horrific crimes, nor into how they were facilitated and allowed by police, social workers and local councillors across the country.
Phillips told MPs this was sufficient because the Jay inquiry into child sexual abuse hasn’t been implemented yet. But the Jay inquiry did not focus on the issue of clannish kin-groups of mostly Mirpuri men grooming and raping young girls, nor on the culpability of many public servants and bodies. While Phillips closed her statement with a promise to ‘victims and survivors’ that ‘no one should go through what they did’, her promise to ‘strain every sinew’ to prevent these crimes being repeated rang very hollow.
Thankfully, Katie Lam, MP for Weald of Kent since last July was in the chamber. She cut through Phillips’ obfuscation to demonstrate the extent to which the government has failed victims. As Lam said, ‘The girls we are talking about are predominantly white. The men who preyed on them were predominately Muslim, generally either from Pakistan or of Pakistani heritage… one of the victims from Dewsbury was told by her rapist: “We’re here to fuck all the white girls and fuck the government.”’ Lam went on to state that in many cases these crimes were religiously and racially motivated and that without a national, statutory inquiry it’s impossible to understand why these crimes happened, or to be sure we can prevent them in the future.
Some of these rapes were even tacitly approved by the state. Lam used the example of ‘Anna’ from Bradford, vulnerable and in residential care, who aged 14 made repeated allegations of rape and sexual abuse to the social workers who should have protected her. But just the following year she ‘married’ her abuser, at an Islamic ‘wedding’ which her social worker attended as a guest. Social Services then allowed Anna’s ‘in-laws’ to adopt her.
Some abusers were even employed by local authorities, Lam went on to say: ‘The ringleader of the Rochdale rape gang, Shabir Ahmed, was employed as a welfare rights officer by Oldham council. Yet not one person – not one – has been convicted for covering up these institutionalised rapes.’
We must look this evil in the eye if we are to confront it
This is the heart of the issue. There are guilty men and women across the country. Lam asked: ‘Why have ministers refused to establish a dedicated unit in the National Crime Agency to investigate councillors and officials accused of collusion and corruption?’ It’s an excellent question. Perhaps sometimes when the rot goes too deep those who govern us are frightened of the truth. Lam also called for a specialist unit to investigate police officers, given the example of a case in Rotherham where the father of an abuse victim was arrested when he attempted to rescue his daughter from her abusers. Meanwhile his daughter was repeatedly assaulted by a gang of men.
As Lam said, ‘these criminals were unafraid of law enforcement’. They enjoyed ‘effective immunity’. To convey the true horror of these crimes Lam read one set of sentencing remarks relating to the rape of a 13 year old girl. Lam’s reply to Phillips’s statement is available here.
Lam is right. We must look this evil in the eye if we are to confront it. There are at least 50 towns where these rape gangs have operated. The state does not want to face the truth. A crowdfunded effort to obtain the transcripts of these trials has met with resistance, with at least one judge questioning the public interest. We need a statutory inquiry led by a judge who is unafraid of the truth and willing to question everyone involved in these crimes. Anything less is a betrayal of thousands of young girls.
Comments