Keir Starmer to launch grooming gangs inquiry that will make witnesses testify

[IwantToRetire]

Keir Starmer has confirmed that there will be a statutory inquiry into grooming gangs which means it will have the power to compel witnesses to testify and provide documents

The Prime Minister, who has previously resisted calls for another probe, said it was now "the right thing to do". And he confirmed it would be a statutory inquiry, which means it will have legal powers to compel witnesses to testify and produce documents. It comes as the findings of Baroness Dame Louise Casey's rapid audit into group-based child exploitation and abuse are due to be announced next week.

Mr Starmer said: "I have never said we should not look again at any issue. I have wanted to be assured that on the question of any inquiry. That's why I asked Louise Casey who I hugely respect to do an audit.

"Her position when she started the audit was that there was not a real need for a national inquiry over and above what was going on. She has looked at the material she has looked at and she has come to the view that there should be a national inquiry on the basis of what she has seen."

The PM added: "I have read every single word of her report and I am going to accept her recommendation. That is the right thing to do on the basis of what she has put in her audit.

"I asked her to do that job to double check on this; she has done that job for me and having read her report, I respect her in any event. I shall now implement her recommendations." According to a leak of Baroness Casey's review, it is said to state some victims were "institutionally ignored for fear of racism."

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/keir-starmer-says-grooming-gangs-35393814

DEI about victims and inequality, so im not surprised that race of perpetrators is poorly recorded. There hasnt been a belief that sexual assault could be racially motivated, so no one has pushed for it to be recorded accurately.

Both Jess and Diana Johnson often look absolutely defeated in parliament.

I think phillips is out of her depth. It must be difficult to work under Starmer - he has a tendency to allow others to deliver and justify unpopular policy, then announce u turns himself, as if hes had to step in an make adult decisions. Then disappear again and leave MPs to explain why the policy has changed.

They can’t ignore the role of multiple governments (both Labour and Conservative) or it will stink to high heaven. A lot of this happened under New Labour in the early 2000s, but it’s gone on for decades.

A friend of mine says that when the abuse of these children was first reported the Labour Party was too busy to care because they were concentrating on banning fox hunting. Were these going on at the same time?

Anne Cryer blew whistle about 2002. Fox hunting banned 2004. She's not wrong.

Its been going on for decades easily covering New Labours time in office.

Fox hunting was taking up an awful lot of parliamentary time, but I work on the assumption it had more to do with protecting dodgy Labour councillors in northern cities.

Also, Nick Griffin and the BNP were making a lot of noise about it at the time, but I just treat that as an alibi - plenty of people would have found a reason to look the other way if Nick Griffin, or later Tommy Robinson, had never existed.

This year’s kcsie should be published soon.

hopefully aspects of Casey’s report should be included in some way. Alongside the gender questioning children guidance

How exactly can ethnicity be recorded accurately? Neither self-ID nor guesswork by the police will be reliable & it's not simply a matter of ticking the box that says 'Brown Man'.

We've been capturing data on ethnicity for decades. Schools for example use it intensively to analyse student progress and identify where certain groups might be failing to achieve. Ethnicity data capture usually offers a range of options, with broad groups like White, Black or African American, Asian, and Mixed, with further sub-categories within each group.

It's not perfect, especially for those with a mix of ethnic heritages where the individual (or parent) has to make decisions about the best fit, but it's standard practice.

Exactly.

I wonder whether self declaration
will work in this situation? Is it in the interest of particular criminals to identify their ethnicity?

I am aware of that. Even assuming the criminal is willing to answer a question on ethnicity it's all going to be self-ID though isn't it? We all know where that gets us. What is stopping someone of Pakistani origin claiming to be of Indian origin or vice versa? The police can probably make a decent stab at deciding whether someone is White or Black but beyond that I can't see it.
For those who are anti-immigration it doesn't matter but for data on ethnicity of criminals to be useful to society it must be very accurate indeed.

You ask to see their passport/birth certificate. In the UK we need to show our ID for employment, banking, benefits. If banks can obtain this info why is it so difficult for the Police?

Recording ethnicity won't work perfectly for everyone but, realisitically, what percentage will be indeterminate/incorrect? Less than 10%? Less than 5%, Less than 1%? Even so, if there's a problem you can have an indeterminate/uncertain category and still gather useful data.

The earliest I can find a reference to rape and torture gangs is by the documentary film-maker Anna Hall, who made Groomed: a National Scandal, who I heard say she first started hearing about the issue in the mid 90s.

The way banks obtain ethnic info is by asking their customers. It's self-ID. A passport will show nationality while a birth certificate will show place of birth. Neither shows ethnicity.
I'm not making the point just for the sake of argument. If we don't rely on self-ID I genuinely don't know how we can guarantee that data on ethnic origin can be collected accurately. An Asian person could be of Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh etc. heritage. An African could come from one of over fifty countries. How do you tell which?

The police manage to collect ethnicity date in some cases, just not enough, and different forces use different categories so at the moment it is difficult to collate across forces or compare forces.

I am sure that there is room for improvement even if it does not get to 100% data collected with 100% accuracy.

There are plenty of stories in the media about court cases where the ethnicity, religion, place of birth and heritage of perps is cited and I do not recall any stories about newspapers incorrectly reporting these, so the data is definitely being collected when a case gets to court.

Whatever methods are being used, maybe they could be brought further downstream?

Or maybe the police could actually prioritise ticking this particular box?

I am sure I read that ethnicity recording by the police had dropped rather than increased but happy to be corrected.

Some will give false information, but im not sure if it benefits a suspected sex offender, or someone found guilty to lie and say their heritage is different to what it is?

I said this earlier on and obviously councils or whoever not following through of reports of sexual exploitation because of afraid of being seen to be racist, is in many ways a red herring.

Councils have been covering up child sexual abuse for years, and it is just a likely to be because a group of white men who all know each other from some sort of club or whatever.

Because underlying this, whatever the excuse given for not following up on accusations is because to the decision makes young women have no value, and there is still the lingering suspicion that somehow it is the woman's fault.

And lets say there is all sorts of bright ideas about data collection etc., etc., it will make no difference if they dont put money into employing more social workers, putting more money into safe supervised housing for vulnerable women.

I dont know how many social workers had input into this report but it has been known for years that there aren't enough social workers (let's not forget about the babies who could have been saved but nobody had the time to follow up).

Let alone given the known attitudes of the police given that they are often the first point of contact.

Louise Casey reviewed Rotherham Council in 2015. People should read it.

Not to mention, people forget that most of England is not like London. Lots of these towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire, they're not multicultural, they're bicultural. There's the whites and there's the Pakistanis, and very few of anything else.

And that's something missed out by the people who deny that there's any ethnoreligious aspect to the scandal.

And that's something missed out by the people who deny that there's any ethnoreligious aspect to the scandal.

The fact is that the common factor is poor white girls with little or no support make up the largest number of victims.

And this is the same whether the exploiters are white or Pakistani or whatever.

Perhaps focusing on the women and girls who should be the focus of concern would be a better approach that somehow implying only some men exploit young women living on the margins.

The fact that some cities have different cultural make up doesn't change who it is that men of all race, class or religion target.

I think it should be a fairly wide ranging inquiry, with no stone left unturned. It shouldn’t start with any assumptions.

The right likes to speculate that the police avoided tackling group-based sexual exploitation because of concerns about appearing racist.
Given that the police are often indifferent to being racist, never mind appearing so, it is more likely that their attitudes were informed by an ingrained contempt for working-class people, and young working-class women in particular.

Perpetrators likewise are drawn heavily from among the poor, often working on the fringes of the economy in insecure and poorly paid jobs.

That is not to say that there is a straight, simple line between these signifiers of deprivation and child sexual exploitation. Clearly, the vast majority of those working in such sectors never contemplate, let alone commit, such offences.

Nor is it to deny that child abuse occurs in very different parts of society, too, including among the rich and powerful.

But it takes a wilful blindness not to see in the current scandals a story of poverty, alienation and powerlessness, abetted by an official class-based contempt for working-class people. This is a crisis of a decaying society.

Insofar as ethnicity is an issue, the picture is complex. A lack of statistical evidence does not stop the right reaching for sweeping generalisations to reinforce their prejudices.

Such figures as are to hand, from the National Police Chiefs Council, show that in 2024, where ethnicity was recorded, 85 per cent of group-based child abusers were white, with under 4 per cent of Pakistani heritage.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/grooming-gangs-scandal-about-class-and-gender-not-religion-and-race

also at https://archive.is/EZTC9

I mean I hesitate to cite the literal rape defenders of the SWP, but: Starmer’s ‘grooming gangs’ inquiry won’t bring justice to victims

I think the political left has a real problem with this. I was at a meeting not too long ago where it was confidently stated from the platform that grooming gangs were a moral panic and 95% of sex offences are committed by white men.

Even if that statistic were true, and not the made up bollocks that I assume it to be, that doesn't say anything about the actual offences for which men have been sent to prison.

The victims of Rotherham and Oldham and Telford - not to mention places like Bradford where there still hasn't been a proper inquiry - are still being gaslit. Because the mass rape and torture of young girls is bad, but it's not as bad as Tommy Robinson talking about it.

People wonder why Reform are dominating polls in the Red Wall. I don't think they understand just how hated Labour are in places like Rotherham.