Talking about Asian grooming gangs: some history and a few realities

On Sunday 4th August I accused Kellie-Jay Keen (KJK) of being a populist extremist hell bent on inciting violence. She reposted a video made a few years previously about Asian grooming gangs in a tweet that said “the left would rather you be a rapist than them be accused of being racist. Women and girls don't matter. # Rotherham”.

At the time she posted this tweet and video, a group of approximately 750 anti-immigration ‘protestors’ had surrounded a Rotherham Holiday Inn which accommodated asylum seekers. The ‘protest’ had already turned violent. The hotel was in the process of being smashed up and rioters were trying to set fire to the hotel. I was horrified both at what was happening in Rotherham and by Kellie-Jay Keen’s tweet and video.

Just to remind readers - the recent riots were started by disinformation about the identity of the boy in Southport who attacked a girls dance party, knifing many and killing three small girls. The disinformation was that he was Muslim, a migrant, on an MI5 watch list. Many of the populist extremist accounts spread this disinformation. As of today, there has been at least one arrest for incitement to racial hatred and false communication.

I received a lot of criticism for my tweet, most of which boiled down to this: you can't call us racists for talking about Asian grooming gangs. Some of the responses horrified me almost as much as KJK’s original tweet - especially in relation to the highly negative racial stereotyping (let’s call it what it is - racism) that was at play. Asian grooming gangs and ‘Muslim Pakistani’ men were treated as though they were to blame for the problem of child sexual exploitation in England and Wales and the tragedy of Rotherham was treated as an example of the problems of immigration.

So I tweeted a few of these responses and said that I considered them racist. I was asked by one individual how we are supposed to talk about Asian grooming gangs if even mentioning it is seen as racist. This blog is my attempt to answer that question. It is long but the length is necessary so as to counter the misinformation that extremists are using to manipulate people’s discontents.

Child prostitution and our failure to deal with it

I started researching prostitution back when girls aged 10 – 15 years old were prosecuted and convicted for soliciting and loitering for the purposes of prostitution. It was 1993. Every major city had a red-light area and the main form of prostitution was street-based prostitution. There were a few escort services. Most major cities had brothels masquerading as saunas. It was before the internet but in the aftermath of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Most cities also had a police vice squad which targeted street-based prostitution. They also had sexual health outreach organisations which offered help and sexual health harm minimisation education for women in prostitution.

Back then most of us campaigning, researching, working with women in prostitution knew about the horrendous violence they experienced. Rape. Beatings. Exploitation. I met a young woman who actually believed that the only way out was to get her pimp to beat her so badly that she would be hospitalised. (For those interested, my first book was about women in prostitution and my first article was about how they identified.) We also knew that there was a fast track for girls from local authority care to the street and that the overwhelming majority of those girls and women on the street came from Care. We knew that there were older men picking up teenage girls outside the gates of the local authority care homes in which they lived or the schools where they were educated. In contemporary parlance these men were grooming and exploiting these girls. Yet, there was very little the anyone could do about it. The legal framework didn’t exist and the girls were the ‘throw away, nobody’s girls’. The entire legislative framework about prostitution at that time was focused almost exclusively on the nuisance prostitution caused in our cities. Policing focused almost exclusively on “cleaning the streets”, with policemen aggressively arresting any girl or young woman they found on the streets. Local neighbourhood groups formed that also targeted the girls and women being exploited. So for instance, 1994 in Balsall Heath a local (predominantly Asian) neighbourhood group started policing the streets, attempting to disrupt the women's work, taking registration numbers of punters which they then forwarded to the police.

In the summer of 1994 I spent three months in a place not dissimilar to Balsall Heath, interviewing many of the women and girls who were on the streets, hanging out in a probation centre that worked with girls and women arrested for prostitution related offences and accompanying the local sexual health outreach project as it went about its business reaching out in the evenings and nights to the girls and women who were on the streets. I met many young women that summer and every single one of them had a story to tell about being groomed, beaten, raped, and exploited. I spoke to several local police officers who said they could do little to help these young women mostly because these women didn't want their help and saw their pimps and exploiters as boyfriends. And apart from anything else, all of us knew full well that a woman or girl involved in prostitution had a snowball's chance in hell of being successful if she reported her abusers to the police. The very fact that they were involved in prostitution made them “bad girls” and “bad women” and not credible witnesses. And so it was that what we call grooming gangs today operated with impunity throughout the 1990s.

Remember - the scandals about grooming and exploitation of girls in northern cities was in full swing during this time period.

Things began to change in the late 90s as practitioners, feminists, activists, academics and professionals came together to try to stop the criminalisation of the victims. It is easy to forget just how many girls and young women were arrested each year for soliciting or loitering for the purposes of prostitution. These days the figure for arrests and convictions of adults is less than 400 per annum. In the 90s it was 1000s. In 1995 The Children Society published The Games Up Redefining Child Prostitution which made the simple argument that it was wrong to arrest much less charge a girl under the age of sexual consent for any prostitution related offences. In the previous few years there had been girls as young as 13 who had been prosecuted and convicted. In 1996 Wolverhampton police piloted a diversion scheme in which young girls would be diverted out from criminal justice and into social services. In 1999 Barnardo’s published Whose Daughter Next? Children Abused Through Prostitution which argued that where children were concerned the usual ‘triangle of relations’ between punter, pimp and prostitute should be replaced with abusing adult, child sexual offender and abused girl. Over that same time period there were several academic studies looking at what was then called child prostitution as well as Home Office funded research. All the studies were highly critical of the failures of policy and practise in protecting young girls and young women, especially those coming from Care.

The challenge of protecting sexually exploited children

By the turn of the millennia, and under a New Labour government, the Department of Health and the Home Office issued Safeguarding Children Involved In Prostitution. The guidance instructed police and statutory services to treat children involved in prostitution “as children in need who may be suffering or may be likely to suffer significant harm. That services that come into contact with these children have a responsibility to safeguard and promote their welfare and to cooperate effectively to prevent children becoming involved in and to divert children out of prostitution”.

There was a problem with this guidance though. It also stated that if young girls and young women continued to go back to prostitution despite the best efforts of the police and the social services they were deemed to have voluntarily returned and thereby were to be treated as offenders and not criminal as not victims. This meant police and social services tended to focus on assessing the extent to which girls consented. I wrote about it here.

I did a lot of research with police and practitioners back then and my view was that the policy guidance simply didn't fit the problem. I wrote about it in a chapter in this book. Many of the girls that I had met who were involved in prostitution and were being exploited and violently victimised often did not see themselves as victims. They saw their abusers as boyfriends. They saw their involvement in prostitution as a means of securing some type of economic independence even though ironically most of their money was taken from them. There were so many problems with the guidance even though it was written with the best of intentions. Perhaps the biggest was that it relied on overly simplistic notion of consent. Could the girls literally have chosen not to do what they were doing? If yes, then many of the police and social workers I interviewed thought that the girls had chosen it as a lifestyle (yes, that is how people thought about children in prostitution). The other big problem was, to me, screamingly obvious. The guidance put the solution back on the shoulders of social services. Yet most of these girls and young women were already involved in social services, and it was their history of being girls in care that made them vulnerable to their pimps and exploiters. Social workers had no new resources to deal with the problem of child sexual exploitation and as quite a few told me they would prioritise their work with infants and toddlers who were experiencing significant harm over and above their work with a young woman, say 15 years old, who did not want their help. Such prioritisation made sense in the context of social workers’ own concerns and fears about being held liable for the death of a small child.

Fast forward a few years to the then Labour government's Sex Offences Act 2003 which introduced the crime that we now call grooming. It also made the commercial sexual exploitation of children (aged under 16 years old) in pornography or prostitution unlawful. Importantly though it did not make it unlawful for 16 and 17 year olds. Child sexual exploitation of 16 and 17 year olds was continued to be lawful until 2015.

What does all of this have to do with Asian grooming gangs?

Something very simple but rarely discussed.

Social services and the police failed to respond to most child sexual exploitation throughout the 1990s and 2000s - regardless of the race or ethnicity of the exploiters. The required legal and practice-based framework and laws did not exist until into the 2010s. And even then, if the girls did not fit into the highly gendered stereotype of a blameless female victim or were seen by the police or social services as troublesome, officials would often turn a blind eye. It is truly difficult to overstate the extent to which some police and some social workers really did think involvement in prostitution for girls was a lifestyle choice.

Of course there were notable exceptions. The National Working Group, which comprised voluntary sector organisations working with girls who were being sexually exploited, police, social services and academics (myself included) was formed in the early 2000s. This group existed specifically to improve child protection in this area. Many sexual health outreach organisations had already set up specific young girl groups. Barnardos and the NSPCC started setting up projects to work with the girls and young women (remember, prosecution of exploiters is only one part of the puzzle - the girls needed help). My memory of those times was that many of us were aware and doing the best we could to work with the criminal justice system to secure prosecutions at the same time as develop projects that worked with highly vulnerable and highly traumatised young women. But we were scaling a mountain of sexism, entrenched attitudes and prejudice against young working-class girls.

The idea that the only people who care about or have exposed grooming gangs, Asian or otherwise, are people like Tommy Robinson or KJK is grotesquely offensive and inaccurate. Indeed, radical feminist Julie Bindel was one of the first journalists to do a decent piece of investigative journalism that tackled head on the “identifiable racial element” of the grooming gangs in England's northern cities. Most of us who had worked in the area of prostitution knew that there has always been a racial and migrant dimension to pimping and exploitation - but we also knew the greater preponderance of pimping and exploitation happened at the hands of white men. Simply, not all pimps and grooming gangs are black or brown and whatever else may be said about grooming and exploitation religion does not propel people into pimping, even if it is sometimes used as an excuse.

The challenges of prosecuting child sexual exploitation

In 2012(ish), I was invited to speak at a day conference organised by Howard League for Penal Reform. They had recently commissioned me to look at the criminalization of sexually exploited young girls. To that end I spoke with several practitioners and many police officers again up and down the country about their endeavours to deal with child sexual exploitation. There was someone else sharing the platform with me that day. Sir Keir Starmer. He was the then Director of Public Prosecutions. As befitted his role,  Starmer’s focus was on the challenges that the Crown Prosecution Service were facing in bringing prosecutions against those individuals and gangs who were sexually exploiting young girls – Asian or otherwise. Much of what he said we feminists had been campaigning or writing about for years. One of the key elements to bringing a prosecution is the “credibility” of the victim. This is the same for all sexual offences. Part of establishing the credibility of the witness [remember in strict legal terms, victims of sexual violence are only witnesses to the crimes that have been committed against them] is the need to find undermining evidence. This means that the police have a duty to provide the Crown Prosecution Service with any evidence that they think undermines the case and the credibility of the witness. So even by 2012, more than a decade after government guidance was published saying that girls in prostitution ought to be treated as victims and not offenders, part of prosecuting sexual exploitation meant combing through police records, social services files, finding any evidence that the girls may have lied to the police at any point, made false allegations against their abusers or indeed had got into trouble with the criminal justice system, maybe for prostitution related offences. The point here should be obvious - the failure to prosecute grooming gangs and other men involved in the sexual exploitation of children has more to do with the sexism women and girls experience when trying to get justice for crimes committed against them than it does the race or ethnicity of the offenders. And in the case of our northern cities, both might be a factor. Careful reading of the multiple reports into Rotherham do show evidence of officials not wanting to deal with the racial dimension. But to suggest that ‘The Left’ (who is that anyway???) fear being called racists and that this was one of the main drivers if not the driver of the failure to protect the girls from ‘Asian grooming gangs’ is a gross misrepresentation of the failure to bring sexual exploiters to justice. It is misinformation of this type that started the Southport riots last week.

Please note the at no point have I denied the existence of Asian grooming gangs. I personally do not use that term not because I have any shyness about recognising the race and ethnicity of sexual exploiters. I do not use that term because the sheer horror of the violence perpetrated against girls through sexual exploitation does not become a separate thing just because those who are exploiting her are Asian, white, Muslims, Buddhists, Welsh, Jewish or any other cultural, religious, ethnic or racial categorization you want to use. To hold up the victims of Asian grooming gangs as somehow more offended against does a tremendous disservice to all the other young women who are raped, beaten and exploited by white men.

And then came Jimmy Savile and Rotherham

The first decade of the 21st century was a grim decade where sexual violence was concerned. Those familiar with the background to the Rotherham scandal will know that at the local level the first reports of sexual exploitation of girls - mostly from local authority care - started rumbling in the late 1990s. As noted earlier it was also in the early 2000s that the issue of how best to deal with prostitution attracted the attention of the then Labour government. Funded by the Home Office, researchers evaluated what was being done about prostitution in Bristol, Sheffield and Rotherham. Part of that report noted poor professional practise from police and local authorities especially in terms of minimising child protection issues. All of us who were working in the field at the time knew this as I have outlined above. There were various other reports and investigations about child abuse in Rotherham between 2001 - 2013 when Rotherham council commissioned Professor Alexis Jay to conduct an independent inquiry into its handling of child sexual exploitation since 1997.

It is important to put this in context. Reports about Asian grooming gangs had been circulating for at least a decade. And the scandals in places like Rotherham were made all the more tragic because this was the same time period in which the horrendous abuses of Jimmy Savile were made public. Part of the Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal was also the revelation of widespread sexual abuse going back over decades by prominent media and political figures.

In 2012 it seemed as though all major institutions in the UK were somehow turning a blind eye if not directly complicit in failing to protect girls from sexual abuse and in failing to deal with sexual exploitation. Things got so bad that by July 2014 the then home secretary, Theresa May established the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. The point of the inquiry was to examine how the country's institutions handled their duty to protect children from sexual abuse.

The idea that Asian grooming gangs and failing to protect girls in Rotherham, Rochdale etc is unique is, tragically, wholly inadequate. The problem was countrywide, everywhere and at every level.

Whilst what happened in some of our northern cities did have a racial dimension and as the investigations have subsequently shown practitioners, councillors and police were unwilling to be honest about the extent of both CSE and the racial dimension. However, Jay’s 2014 report into Rotherham conclusively stated that there was “no evidence of children's social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators when dealing with individual child protection cases, including CSE”. It is simply not the case that the problem of child sexual exploitation and the woefully inadequate manner in which it has been policed over the decades can be attributed to Muslim Pakistani men or the fear of being called a racist for acknowledging this. To claim such is a terrible generalisation that relies on negative stereotyping of Muslim men as much as it relies on negative stereotyping of men of South Asian heritage. Negative stereotyping is the basis of racist claims. To continuously make these claims is misinformation.

Fanning the flames of racism

To state as KJK does that the Left would rather you be a rapist then be called a racist and to post a video repeating the misinformation outlined above and to start with an almost gleeful “I hope you like the inflammatory title” in the midst of an violent, anti-immigration riot in Rotherham that targeted asylum seekers in a Holiday Inn hotel is, in my mind, fanning the flames of racism.

Places like Rotherham, Rochdale, Leeds, and other northern towns bear the scars of the criminal misdeeds of grooming gangs. I do not underestimate the depth and extent of those scars or the on-going battles for justice. But, it is an obscenity to use the tragedies of these towns and of our collective failure to deal with child sexual exploitation to stoke - or indeed provide a lightning rod - to fan the flames of racial discord in 2024. The outputs of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse are robust and they paint a damning picture. There is no one ethnic group that is responsible for child sexual exploitation. It isn't just the girls in the cities of the north that have had their lives shattered by the criminal sexual violence of men who see them as little more than a meal ticket and a commodity and, in all likelihood, also know the challenges that the police and the Crown Prosecution Service still have in bringing them to justice. After all, many of the girls who are sexually exploited across this country are often seen as nothing more than “throw away girls”. Too many of the victims come from families torn apart but the aggregate effects of poverty and of consecutive Tory government’s disinvestment in education, Youth Services and so on.

But this is not the story that people like Tommy Robinson and KJK are telling. They are cherry picking our troubled history of dealing with child sexual exploitation to create a focus, a story, a justification for their own extremist views about the history and legacy of migration in this country. Yes Asian grooming gangs operated with impunity through the 1990s and early 2000s, but then so did politicians, media figures, white grooming gangs, and far too many other men. To talk about Asian grooming gangs in the absence of its wider context and to do so in a manner which acts as a lightning rod for political discontent is naïve at best and racist at worst.

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Post-script

Upon reflection, I have removed from the final section references to KJK possibly inciting violence with her tweets. Being absolutely honest, the inclusion of this accusation stemmed from my deeply held conviction that as social influencers our job during the violent riots was to be even more responsible than usual. It is still my opinion that the tweet and posting that video was inflammatory - as KJK herself acknowledges. The point of this blog was about the racism that sits underneath some of the ways that CSE is discussed and the stereotypes that are being drawn on when we refer to ‘Asian men’ in England.