Trust in the institutions that are meant to protect us is built slowly but shattered quickly. Over the past decade, report after report has revealed the same shocking story: that thousands of vulnerable girls were groomed and abused by gangs while the institutions charged with their safety looked the other way. Baroness Casey’s investigation, which prompted the PM’s U-turn on a new statutory inquiry, is just the latest in a series of findings that lay bare the scale of that betrayal.
She describes a “collective failure” on the part of the British state. Victims were failed not once but repeatedly. This sustained failure by governments and authorities to confront the problem failed victims first and foremost, but the consequences have reverberated across society.
Part of the responsibility for that failure must lie with a culture that chose to prioritise social cohesion and community relations over justice for victims and punishment of perpetrators. Social cohesion is something we should all care about – society cannot function without it – trust in neighbours, communities and government is the backbone of a civilised society and last summer’s unrest was a stark reminder of how fragile social cohesion can be, and how quickly it can unravel.
But community relations should never have been a rationale to prevent proper investigation of the gangs – and the refusal to tackle the issues that enabled grooming, with clarity and honesty, should also provide a stark warning that in fact community cohesion can only be preserved by confronting uncomfortable truths head-on, however difficult that may seem.
Going back to August 2014, the Jay Report revealed not only the extent of abuse in Rotherham but also highlighted a critical missed opportunity: the failure of authorities to work openly and honestly with the communities involved. Professor Alexis Jay noted in her report that “throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue.” Had the authorities acknowledged who was perpetrating these crimes and engaged with the communities concerned openly and frankly, the vast majority of whom were as horrified by the actions of some Pakistani men as everyone else, we might have built stronger communities rather than fracturing them.
After all, what could be more corrosive to public trust than either deliberate obfuscation or wilful ignorance in tackling one of the most universally condemned crimes imaginable, an approach that was at least partly motivated by avoiding hard truths about the preponderance of offenders from a particular community.
In focus groups where the gangs operated this sense of anger and mistrust is palpable. People speak with deep frustration about how vulnerable working-class girls from their communities were ignored, dismissed, or “adultified” by those meant to protect them. For some, this confirmed the belief that their communities simply didn’t matter to the authorities – and perpetrators did. And when these concerns are dismissed as politically motivated or shut down in the name of political correctness, they don’t go away. Resentment doesn’t fade when it’s ignored. It festers.
This breakdown of trust doesn’t stop there. Valid concerns, left unaddressed, feed real conspiracy theories. It allows the conversation to be dominated by those who want to use it to sow division, as Louise Casey herself says the alternative with “the racists is giving them more ammunition”. In the long term, attempts to avoid confronting issues to prevent inflaming community tensions are toxic to the very cohesion they aim to protect.
The task now for the Government is to rebuild trust. Time will tell whether the measures announced by the Home Secretary help to do this, but it is a crucial first step that the failures of the British state and the underlying factors are being discussed openly in Parliament. The Government’s challenge is convincing the public that truth and justice will be fully pursued, and that nothing like this can happen again.
In practice, this must also mean putting an end to a type of politics that dismisses real concerns because we don’t ‘trust the motives’ of those raising them. Most of those campaigning on grooming gangs have done so out of genuine concern for the victims and justice; others have done so for political or prejudiced reasons – but ultimately the Government should have been guided by doing what was right for victims and their communities – regardless of whether they agreed with some of where the calls came from. The challenge for other politicians is to avoid reducing this into an opportunity for political point-scoring. For the public this isn’t about one party or another – and our polling makes abundantly clear they see this as failure shared across successive governments.
The truth is an end in itself, and above all, we owe it to the victims to, as Casey puts it, “grasp this as a society.” But beyond justice for the victims, we should take from this a lesson that social trust depends on pursuing the truth, no matter how much it hurts or what we might find. Bad things grow in the dark , and sunlight is an incredibly effective disinfectant. The darker the issue, the more sunlight is needed.
[See also: Keir Starmer’s grooming gang cowardice]
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