Groomed: A National Scandal (Channel 4)
According to a Channel 4 documentary, a report that highlighted over 330 young women in danger from Asian grooming gangs was labeled as ‘toxic’ and concealed by the Home Office.
Investigative journalist Anna Hall, in her 90-minute film “Groomed: A National Scandal” airing soon, uncovers that the report on child exploitation in Rotherham during the early 2000s was part of a study supported by Tony Blair’s administration.
Hall directly questions one of the report’s writers, Jayne Senior, asking whether the report’s findings were dismissed because the offenders were predominantly British-Pakistani.
Senior replies: ‘I was told on more than one occasion that I needed to stop rocking the multicultural boat. We were talking about children that were being exploited, trafficked, tortured, raped.’
The documentary is Channel 4 at its best, airing a series of shocking interviews with victims of systematic mass abuse carried out in full view of police, social services and schools.
The evidence is presented without melodrama or sensationalism, which renders it all the more devastating.
And, despite the denials of the authorities, it is clear that organised grooming gangs – many from Muslim communities – across England continue to target adolescent girls. Hall says one care home manager in Blackpool tells her that the scale of abuse is worse than it has ever been.
Though the weight of the evidence is staggering, this investigation’s most powerful segments are not its revelations, but the interviews with survivors. Three victims’ words are voiced by actresses. Only two victims appear on screen, even giving their real names: Jade and Chantelle.
Telling the documentary about her ordeal, it becomes clear that Jade’s treatment at the hands of both her abusers and the justice system has been so atrocious that she has nothing left to fear from the worst life can do to her.
Brought up in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, Jade talks about how she moved in with her father when she was 14 to escape her mother’s new boyfriend. Her father, a heroin addict, introduced her to his dealers, who pretended to befriend her ‘just to get me drunk and make me feel special’.
She began to trust one man, who introduced her to his cousins and uncles – all from the British-Pakistani community.
Taken into care by social services, she began going to regular drink and drugs parties, where she would be forced into having sex. ‘You’re in the middle of nowhere, don’t have a clue where you are, don’t know how you’re gonna get home,’ she says. ‘You’re literally with all of these big men – what do you do?
‘I was 14 years old. I’ve gone home with black eyes. I’ve run up the road naked to try and get out of a hotel and they’ve just [driven] up the road and got me again. So then, the next time, you just do it. Because you’re frightened.’ She has kept countless texts from her rapists, showing how she was entrapped and groomed. Some of her descriptions of rape and sexual assault are too graphic for a family newspaper.
But, when she was reported missing from her care home, police charged her with inciting a minor to engage in sexual activity because the gang had bullied her into bringing another girl to one of their parties.
Incredibly, Jade – who was on a police register as a known ‘vulnerable young person’ – was convicted and sentenced to two years in a detention centre.
She served 14 months and was placed on the sex offenders’ register, leaving her unable to have contact with people under 18 – even though she was under 18 herself. Even today, she is not allowed to join her own children on school trips. Despite all the evidence in her possession, none of her abusers have been charged. She estimates she was raped by hundreds of men over a period of about three years.
Another survivor, Steph from Keighley in Yorkshire, was able to point out one of her rapists to police – only to be told he was himself a serving police officer. The man has never been charged.
Acknowledging the ‘political firestorm’ around the scandal, and the accusations of systemic racism in the courts, Hall keeps the focus on her main message: that Asian grooming gangs are still abusing countless children.
She exposes their methods: how they send their own sons, aged 11 or younger, to approach girls their own age in schools or outside care homes. The boys then introduce the girls to their older male relatives, who ply their victims with sweets, then alcohol and drugs.
This has been going on in English towns and cities for decades, to the general indifference of police and other authorities.
Of course, there are hundreds of white men who groom and abuse young women in this country – including the six men from Bolton, Greater Manchester, who were jailed yesterday for abusing under-age girls. But it is undoubtedly a phenomenon in some British-Pakistani communities, too.
As survivor Chantelle says of the authorities: ‘Is it because they don’t want to be classed as racist? Or is it because we have genuinely just got no one that cares?’
- Groomed: A National Scandal airs on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm.
