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by Charlie Peters
Britain’s grooming gangs scandal is attracting attention. It’s happened before, but now it seems different.
I’ve dedicated most of my career in journalism to covering it. Because it’s the most appalling atrocity in modern British history.
In this thread, I’ll tell you what I know about the crisis, what I’ve uncovered, and what is yet to be revealed…
When did it start?
Reports of gangs of men abusing children via on-street grooming go back as far as the 1970s.
But it first came to major prominence after Labour MP Ann Cryer raised concerns about the targeting of young girls by “Asian men” outside school gates.
It was 2003. She was accused of racism by many in her own party and had to install a panic alarm. Cryer was vilified for trying to support girls facing appalling abuse by predominantly Pakistani men. She was the first to endure this treatment, but by no means the last.
Then a year later in 2004 came 'Edge of the City,' a Channel 4 documentary about social workers in Bradford.
Hours before transmission it was yanked from the schedules.
Unite Against Fascism, The 1990 Trust, and the National Assembly Against Racism lobbied Channel 4 to drop it, as did the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire.
The local elections were coming up. And the film captured grooming gangs for the first time. South Asian men abusing teenage white girls. They were worried that the BNP, who were making a lot of noise about the abuse gangs, would profit.
So it was canned. Another opportunity to discuss children as young as 11 being gang raped was missed.
A journalist based in the north was the next to pick up the story.
Andrew Norfolk at The Times had reported on Ann Cryer. But he moved on because he admitted: "I didn’t want the story to be true because it made me deeply uncomfortable."
"The suggestion that men from a minority ethnic background were committing sex crimes against white children was always going to be the far right’s fantasy story come true."
"Liberal angst kicked instinctively into top gear."
But in 2010, something snapped in Norfolk, and he felt like he could no longer ignore it.
In 2010 he heard a radio report about a grooming gang in Manchester.
He started going through archives. What he found was a pattern.
Since 1997 there had been 17 cases in 13 towns where a group of men had approached a girl on the street and groomed her.
Of the 56 convicted, 3 were white, 53 were Asian.
50 of those had Muslim names, most were Pakistani.
But when he went to the authorities, they refused to talk.
Barnados, the children’s charity, told staff not to talk to him.
At the time, it seemed like the only prominent people talking about this crisis were right-wing politicians and activists, such as Tommy Robinson's EDL.
The strategy of the groomers was to pose as a friend or a boyfriend. That's why we call them grooming gangs.
Then draw the girl into their social circle, with gifts and attention.
They’d offer them drugs and alcohol. And then they’d abuse them.
Threats were used - against them or their family - to control them.
And then they’d be passed around the whole gang to abuse.
What blew this open was the small town of Rotherham, with its decaying steelworks and beautiful medieval chapel.
There Andrew Norfolk met Jayne Senior.
She ran Risky Business, a youth project working with children at risk of exploitation.
More and more of her work had come to involve abused girls.
She was able to introduce Norfolk to victims and their families.
But neither the journalist or the whistleblower expected the scale of the scandal that would emerge.
Reports of the abuse in the town went back decades.
The victims who spoke to Norfolk revealed how they’d been horribly abused: the most horrific torture and sexual depravity.
And they also spoke of how the authorities - Rotherham Council and South Yorkshire Police - had failed them.
The stories caused an outcry.
The government stepped in and commissioned social worker Alexis Jay to hold an inquiry.
She found that this wasn’t about a few girls.
She estimated that between 1997 and 2013, 1,400 children had been abused. This was a conservative estimate.
Almost all the victims were white, most of the abusers were Pakistani.
And that's despite them only making up just 5% of the town.
The report was so damning that Rotherham Council was investigated in 2015.
Louise Casey found that the authorities had failed the victims and that the council had covered-up the abuse.
Political correctness was to blame.
But also something more sinister.
Pakistani British councillors had wielded unusual power, and they had used it to head off concerns. People who tried to raise concerns were silenced with bogus accusations of racism.
But even though some people left their jobs, nobody was fired.
The guilty all kept their pensions. Some got jobs with other councils. Some who knew but looked the other way were FINALLY deselected by Labour in 2023 after a series of GB News reports.
There were serious questions about how the crisis had been allowed to go on for so long. One instance has always stuck with me.
In March 2000, a secret deal was cut. It was arranged between a child rapist and police officers.
An abused girl was handed over to the police by her abuser. In return, he was allowed to go free.
Jahanghir Akhtar, who later became deputy head of the council, was accused of facilitating the deal. He denied it.
The abuser was his cousin, Arshid Hussain, a notorious gangster.
Foreign systems of prioritising distant family kinship over justice causing a crisis? In South Yorkshire?
Hassan Ali, the policeman who helped arrange the secret deal, was run over and killed by a car on the day he was told he was under investigation.
With his death, there was no further inquiry.
There was also a Home Office report.
In 2000 a local solicitor worked with Risky Business.
She discovered the scale of the abuse and how much of it revolved around the gangster Arshid Hussain and his brothers.
But when she filed her report she was told it was “unhelpful”.
And when a victim she worked with went to the police, she was texted by her abuser.
He had her sibling. She dropped the complaint.
But who at the police station had told her abuser she was there?
When the solicitor complained, she was told never to refer to 'Asian' men ever again.
She was also booked on a two-day equality and diversity course. You read that right. Raise concerns about minority rapists targeting girls and you'll be sent for ideological re-training.
And then the Risky Business offices were broken into.
There was no sign the doors had been forced.
No sign the filing cabinet was broken into. But her files were missing.
And her password protected computer had been accessed. Documents had been deleted.
The minutes of meetings which hadn’t occurred had been created.
Who was behind the break in? Nobody has ever been arrested for it. It has never been explained.
But the true horror of the grooming gangs scandal is that Rotherham wasn’t the only town.
There was also Rochdale.
A gang of Asian men had abused girls.
They took them to a 'special place' and plied them with alcohol.
Then they were passed around from man to man, like a ball.
There was a list on names on the door of the building where the girls were kept,.
Whenever an abuser went there, they put a tick by their name so they could pay for their rapes at the end of each month.
It was like a paedophile honesty box. The failures in Rochdale were so severe that it took the bravery of whistleblower @MaggieOliverUK to expose the scandal in the town.
