The home secretary has given an oral statement to Parliament on the independent inquiry into grooming gangs, promising it will be completed within three years and supported by a £65 million budget.
The inquiry will focus specifically on child sexual abuse committed by grooming gangs, and will explicitly consider the background of offenders, including their ethnicity and religion.
It will also examine whether authorities failed to property investigate the crimes “out of a misplaced desire to protect community cohesion.”
“The inquiry will act without fear or favour, identifying individual, institutional and systemic failure, inadequate organisational responses, and failures of leadership,” home secretary Shabana Mahmood (pictured) said.
Victims will be placed at the forefront of the inquiry, with a charter setting out how they will participate and how their views, experiences and testimony will shape the inquiry’s work.
Acknowledging an inquiry is “long overdue”, Mahmood said the National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse had revealed the horror of the catalogue of abuse “with devastating clarity”.
“It is vital that we too call these crimes what they were: multiple sexual assaults, committed by multiple men, on multiple occasions,” she said.
“Children were submitted to beatings and gang rapes. Many contracted sexually transmitted infections. Some were forced to have abortions. Others had their children taken from them.”
There had been an “abject failure by the state” to protect the young and vulnerable, Mahmood added, while “some in positions of power turned a blind eye to the horror, even covered it up.”
Despite what the home secretary called “a shameful lack of national data”, Mahmood said Baroness Casey, author of the National Audit, had been clear that in some local areas, “Disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds were amongst the suspects”.
She continued:
“Like every member of my community who I know, I am horrified by these acts.
“We must root out this evil, once and for all. The sickening acts of a minority of evil men – as well as those in positions of authority, who looked the other way – must not be allowed to marginalise – or demonise – entire communities of law-abiding citizens.”
The inquiry will be chaired by Baroness Anne Longfield, former children’s commissioner, supported by Zoë Billingham CBE, chair of Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust and a former inspector at HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, and Eleanor Kelly CBE, the former chief executive of Southwark Council.
It will be formed of a series of local investigations overseen by a national panel with full statutory powers. Oldham is the first town to be named as subject to a local investigation, with other locations determined by the chair and panel “in due course”.
Any evidence of criminality uncovered by the inquiry will be passed to law enforcement to consider prosecution.
As well as launching the inquiry, the government said it has accepted the recommendations in Baroness Casey’s audit in full.
Research has been commission from UK Research and Innovation to “rectify the unacceptable gaps” in understanding the backgrounds of perpetrators, including ethnicity and religion. The Department for Education will also investigate gaps in ‘children in need’ data identified in the audit, which resulted in an under-reporting of the scale of the crisis.
A legal duty for information sharing between safeguarding will be introduced, with each child given a unique identifier to link all data across government.
The audit also identified “an absurdity” in the legal system that allowed some child rapists to be convicted of lesser crimes.
“As a result, we are now changing the law to make clear that children cannot consent when they have been raped by an adult, so perpetrators are charged for the hideous crime they have committed,” the home secretary said.
“While the law has protected abusers from the consequences of their crimes, it has too often punished victims. Some survivors were convicted for crimes they had been coerced into, continuing their trauma to this day.”
Legislation is underway to disregard offences related to prostitution, and the Ministry of Justice will work with the Criminal Cases Review Commission to ensure applications from people who believe they have been wrongly criminalised individuals are reviewed.
Taxi licensing will also be subjected to new legislation after the National Audit identified abusers applied for licences to circumvent protections put in place by local councils.
Image credit: Shabana Mahmood ©House of Commons
