On ‘grooming gangs’

Ten years ago, when I was working directly in child safeguarding and the fostering of racial hatred was still a minority sport linited to the BNP/EDL rather than a culture war tactic for the previously mainstream Tory party, I wrote a series of essays on the Alexis Jay report on the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal.

I thought it had been lost, along with a lot of my other stuff from the time when the British Library digital archive was hacked and taken down, but I’’ve found an old copy in my own archive.

I may re-publish the whole thing, but in the meantime, here’s what I think is the crucial bit in terms of how to rebut the new wave of racist shit from Jenrick, Tice, Musk and co. more effectively than the current liberal commentariat seem to be able manage.

Tl;dr? Child Sexual Exploitation happens when opportunity meets vulnerability. Race is irrelevant. Racism has made it seem relevant. Alexis Jay (and others) were too narrow-minded to grasp that.

………..

(From November 2014)

The question of whether being an Asian man makes you more likely to sexually exploit children because of your “culture” is the one that has dominated the media. The Jay report itself appears conflicted. The chapter on ethnicity starts with a categorical enough statement:

As has been stated many times before, there is no simple link between race and child sexual exploitation, and across the UK the greatest numbers of perpetrators of CSE are white men (para 11.2).

This suggests that those arguing for ‘race-blind’ protection and prosecution. Sunny Hundal, for example, argues, using the same assertion in the Jay report that:

There is certainly a problem here but it’s not about race or religion — it is about misogyny and a desire to subjugate women……The men preyed on these girls because they were weak or because they were physically or mentally intimidated, not because of the colour of their skin.

Yet just a few paragraphs later, the Jay report appears to backslide on its evidence-based position:

The issue of race, regardless of ethnic group, should be tackled as an absolute priority if it is known to be a significant factor in the criminal activity of organised abuse in any local community. There was little evidence of such action being taken in Rotherham in the earlier years.(11.11)

This backsliding (which actually dominates the executive summary to chapter 11) opens the door to those, such as Ben Cobley and now (in practice rather than Ben’s theory) the BNP/EDL , who are keen to peddle their nonsense about embedded “ethnic favouritism” (the argument presumably being that if this alleged favouritism were removed from public policy, child sexual exploitation would magically cease).

This is unfortunate, since there is a perfectly coherent explanation as to why perpetrators in one area may tend to be one ethnic group rather than another, and indeed why perpetrators identified may come from certain ethnic groups in numbers which are disproportionate to their numbers within the overall population. It is an explanation which allows for prosecution and protection to remain as ‘race-blind’ as it should be, while still ensuring that the local contexts for perpetration, which mean that perpetrators come disproportionately are of a single ethnicity, are still appropriately taken into account.

It’s not rocket science. When I discussed the ‘issue of ethnicity’ with a senior social worker colleague the other day, she was quite clear: Asian men in some Northern towns may be the main perpetrators of child sexual exploitation not because of their ‘culture’, but because of the particular “infrastructure” that their working lives provides. In simple terms — they drive taxis, or have friends who do; they work in/own kebab joints, where young people (especially those unsafe and/or unhappy at home) congregate; they work irregular hours in family businesses, in which the don’t clock on or off, and in which absences of two or three hours go unremarked.

Now of course, taxi driving and kebab shop owning can be seen as a part of an Asian ‘culture’, but it is more historically accurate to see it as a structural feature of changes in the economy, and the racial discrimination that accompanied those changes, which just happens to provide, in conjunction with the growth of mobile technology and social media over the last 15 years, the opportunity for people who happen to be of Asian ethnicity to become involved in exploitation. As Arun Kundnani sets out (see references here) in relation to Northern mill towns [1]:

As the mills declined, entire towns were left on the scrap-heap. White and black workers were united in their unemployment. The only future now for the Asian communities lay in the local service economy. A few brothers would pool their savings and set up shop, a restaurant or a takeaway. Otherwise there was minicabbing, with long hours and the risk of violence, often racially motivated. With the end of the textile industry, the largest employers were now the public services but discrimination kept most of these jobs for Whites (2001:106)

If this analysis is taken on board [2], it becomes perfectly reasonable to construct child protection and perpetrator prosecution processes which are both ‘race blind’ and context aware. If more Asians are prosecuted, so be it — being forced into the taxi business by employment discrimination a generation ago does not legitimise heinous actions — but it can still be accepted that there is no direct relationship between ethnicity and a desire to have sex or sell sex with underage girls (and of course this analysis leaves aside that taxi drivers may be prosecuted because they are easier to identify than people who do not go out onto the streets late at night but have the same intent).