There are some people you never forget. For me, I’ll always remember that meeting in Rochdale with the brave women who had survived brutal sexual abuse. They told me how, as young girls, they had been preyed upon, trafficked and raped, mainly by Pakistani and Afghan men.
One woman told me how the violent sexual abuse had started when she was just 12 and how she had thereafter fallen pregnant. I heard how one woman had been raped by more than 150 men by the time she was 16.
They told me how police officers, social workers, teachers and councillors all knew about the paedophilia but turned a blind eye for fear of being called racist. They spoke angrily about how the authorities refused to believe them. The truth was covered up out of fear of inflaming racial tension.
They told me how grateful they were to the handful of professionals like Maggie Oliver – a policewoman whistle-blower – who saved their lives. The truth is that the Rochdale and Rotherham grooming scandals are one of the biggest injustices in our country and no one should ever forget what happened, and what still happens, in many parts of our country.
Last week, sentences totalling more than 100 years were handed down to seven Rotherham perpetrators. Credit must be given to the police and CPS for pursuing these investigations, eventually.
Child sexual abuse cases can take years to build, involve the handling of complex and sensitive evidence and depend on the courage of the victims who have to re-live the ordeal in court for convictions to be secured. The survivors have shown immense fortitude.
As Home Secretary I was passionate about making progress on this national scandal. Last year we set up a specialist task force, led by the National Crime Agency, to galvanise the investigative work with the police. I worked with the task force closely; it secured over 500 new arrests in its first year. Sadly, much was left undone by the time of the general election and so there is still a lot more to do. We must secure justice for thousands of girls and also ensure that this type of industrial-scale cover-up isn’t repeated.
A legal duty on professionals to report sexual abuse is needed to break through the inertia and fear that prevail in many of our organisations. This was one of the key recommendations in the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse and needs to come into force.
The police have been heavily criticised for their mishandling of the Rochdale cases for more than a decade – most recently in an independent report earlier this year. But have there been any consequences for their neglect? None. More accurate recording of the data is needed to smash the taboos around some incidents of child sexual abuse.
As the independent reports confirm, in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford, the perpetrators were mainly Pakistani. This truth that dared not speak its name was a reason for the institutional silence and that’s why we need to keep talking about it now. This is not to smear a whole class of people but to be honest about a serious problem in some of our towns and cities.
And we need greater powers to deport foreign-born offenders after conviction. It cannot be right that a foreign criminal who has breached our values and rules in such an egregious way can still enjoy residency in our country.
It will require political courage to confront these problems if we are serious about securing justice for the survivors and protecting children in the future. This Labour Government must put child safety above political correctness, but I’m not so sure they will. I hope they prove me wrong.
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