Government on child sex abuse and rape gangs - new authority set up, gang enquiries dropped.

[ArabellaScott]

New child protection authority to be set up.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/government-jess-phillips-home-office-inquiry-elon-musk-b2729520.html

“Building on the national child safeguarding review panel, the child protection authority will address one of IICSA’s central recommendations for providing national leadership and learning on child protection and safeguarding.
“Work to expand the role of the panel will begin immediately, and we will consult on developing the new authority this year.”
...
'Baroness Casey’s three-month national audit on group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse is ongoing. It is building a comprehensive national picture of what is known about child sexual exploitation, identifying local and national trends, assessing the quality of data, looking at the ethnicity issues faced, for example, by cases involving Pakistani heritage gangs, and reviewing police and wider agency understanding. We are developing a new best practice framework to support local authorities that want to undertake victim-centred local inquiries or related work, drawing on the lessons from local independent inquiries such as those in Telford, Rotherham and Greater Manchester. We will publish the details next month.'

However:

Five enquiries into grooming gangs are dropped.

'Katie Lam MP, who responded to the statement, told GB News: “Children across Britain have been sexually tortured by gangs of men.
"We must confront the reality of these crimes and how so many people in positions of power let them go on so long.
“Local inquiries are not good enough — they can’t compel witnesses, they can’t look at themes across the country, and they can’t address national issues like deportation.
“Now the Government is watering them down even further. We won’t let them get away with it.”

'In January, the Home Secretary said that the Government would conduct five local inquiries into the rape gangs who have terrorised so many innocent children. More than three months since the Government announced those local inquiries, Tom Crowther KC, a barrister invited by the Home Office to help establish them, knows almost nothing about their progress, and neither do we. Why is the framework for local inquiries now being led by Ministers, rather than by independent voices such as Tom Crowther? Why is the £5 million set aside for inquiries no longer being allocated, but instead delivered on an “opt-in” basis? What do the Government intend to do about local leaders who say there is no need for an independent inquiry, as they do in Bradford and in Wales?'

https://www.gbnews.com/news/labour-grooming-gang-inquiries-plan-dropped-jess-phillips

Hansard:

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2025-04-08/debates/4FDDC9A4-1AC6-4F34-8E6B-3DF6CC2C981A/TacklingChildSexualAbuse

Content warning: The most upsetting speech I've ever heard from Westminster. Details of CSA.

The reason for separating institutional abuse from street based abuse is about how you tackle it. Institutions who are now aware of the issue are compelled to introduce safeguarding procedures.
Street based grooming gangs are much harder to deal with and it is crucial we understand the varying modus operandi, which means zooming in.
Pakistani grooming gangs exist as a specific phenomenon and have to be analysed as such.

Exactly @Imnobody4

This is one of the IICSA recommendations. Presumably we all agree that collecting this data, as a minimum, would be a good idea?

Collect data on child sexual exploitation and child sexual exploitation networks
Recommendations
Police forces and local authorities in England and Wales must collect data on all cases of known or suspected child sexual exploitation and child sexual exploitation by networks. These data should be separated from other data sets, including data on child sexual abuse, and be disaggregated by the sex, ethnicity and disability of both the victim and perpetrator.
This disaggregated data should be used by police forces to inform problem profiling and activities to disrupt and investigate offenders. Local authorities should take account of the disaggregated data when commissioning services for children.
The UK Government and the Welsh Government should take steps to ensure that these data are being collected and disaggregated in a consistent and accurate way by police forces and local authorities.

https://www.iicsa.org.uk/recommendations/recommendations-child-sexual-exploitation-in-organised-networks-investigation-report.html#1270326126

Yes, absolutely.

Of course statistics can be manipulated in all sorts of ways. Your desire to lump everyone together and avoid too much zooming in could also be seen as dishonest.

In my opinion, the exclusion of institutional abuse is valid and important. It means we can say that the majority of institutional abuse is committed by white men. This requires a specific approach to resolving. It also means that we can say Pakistani men are more likely to commit abuse via informal networks, which requires a different approach. Obviously formal safeguarding practices won’t help and therefore tackling the culture is important.

Tbh though I don’t think you have to get hung up on whether white or Pakistani men are ‘worse’ from a statistical pov. All that matters is that Pakistani gangs exist and that they are, at least partly, influenced by culture.

I have no desire to “lump everyone together” as that would mean me saying we should look at all child abuse, or all child sex abuse or all child sex exploitation and grooming gangs don’t need to be viewed as their own type of crime.

I think grooming gangs are a significant issue and should be looked at separately. However, to look at the particular type of CSE which is grooming gangs we should be looking at all grooming gangs in order to assess potential factors that cause and perpetuate them.

The statistical trickery was not the exclusion of “institutional abuse” it was the exclusion of grooming gangs that accessed their victims via only secular or Christian institutions. So say there are nonChristian religious institutions, these were not excluded. So actually, we cannot even draw conclusions about white men tend to use institutions for access and Pakistani men do not. What that author chose to exclude was excluded because it conveniently disregarded 72% of grooming gangs and victims in order to peddle a racist myth so we can all pretend this isn’t a British (by that I mean everyone resident in Britain) problem but a Pakistani problem.

It is slicing this very specific type of abuse- grooming gangs- which is equally significant to all victims even further to hyper focus on a minority % of grooming gangs and victims.

Tbh though I don’t think you have to get hung up on whether white or Pakistani men are ‘worse’ from a statistical pov.

My point exactly. Statistically neither is “worse.” And manipulating things to make one look worse is ultimately avoiding tackling the problem of grooming gangs as is calling for another national enquiry. The 2015 one did address grooming gangs and did make recommendations to tackle them. Implementing the recommendations is the first step to doing something to stop grooming gangs. Paying another £400m to a bunch of academics to write another research paper is both redundant and ineffective.

I think grooming gangs are a significant issue and should be looked at separately. However, to look at the particular type of CSE which is grooming gangs we should be looking at all grooming gangs in order to assess potential factors that cause and perpetuate them.

Its gone beyond the causes of abuse, and to why so many people in authority knew about these abuse gangs, yet failed to stop it. And cruicial was there a cover up?

Who decided to stop Maggie Olivers role within the police, for example? Her role was authorised, information collected then distroyed.

We need a focused review of these abuses to get to the bottom of if there was a cover up, if so, who coordinated it and why.

By increasing the scope of any inquiry, we will be reducing our ability to get to the truth of these cases.

Yes! 100% agree. Put into effect all the recommendations immediately. There is no good reason to commission another enquiry to take two years to write another report that will recommend the same things we have known we need to do since 2015. We need to act.

Recording more informative about the victims and perpetrators is good, and goes towards understand crime.

But if the police did turn a blind eye in the past and did destroy information, or were pressured by politicians, how confident are we that this information will be anymore accurate than before?

All we will have us a new database of corrupted information.

We already have, the 2015 enquiry looked at this and found that across the board, whether the grooming gang operated in a boarding school, Westminster, a church, a criminal gang, out of a takeaway shop etc that in most cases the police and social workers knew but no charges were brought even after years of victims making reports. 93% of victims said there were cover ups going on between the perpetrators and the police/authorities. 95% of victims said they were called liars when they disclosed abuse to police/authorities.

So why are you so enthusiastic about trusting those same institutions to record crime accurately now?

“But if the police did turn a blind eye in the past and did destroy information, or were pressured by politicians, how confident are we that this information will be anymore accurate than before?”

Yes, this is a problem. There is no deterrent for police/social workers to do coverups. No one gets prosecuted. I think they should be charged with accessory to rape and go to prison if found guilty.

I’m not trusting them. I am enthusiastic about accurate and complete records of crimes.

I enthusiastically agreed to
Presumably we all agree that collecting this data, as a minimum, would be a good idea?

Yes, this is a problem. There is no deterrent for police/social workers to do coverups. No one gets prosecuted. I think they should be charged with accessory to rape and go to prison if found guilty.

This is the point you are missing about the call for inquiries. A full inquiry would need to look at the motivations for the coverups.

This.

Well, Maggie Oliver is campaigning to bring some prosecutions. I won't link, but the title is: They Knew: Standing up to institutional CSAE failings
£75 000 reached of £125 000 target

👀Another U turn?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7872pngj2qo

Goodness, that’s a turn up for the books.