This week on Trigonometry, we're joined by Charlie Chan to talk about one of the most infamous child sex abuse scandals in British history: The Rotherham Gambling Gang. Charlie has been covering the scandal for years, and has spent much of her career covering it. She talks to us about what happened in the 1980s and 1990s, and how the media covered up the scale of the abuse.
00:01:12.000You've been doing amazing coverage for a very long time, actually, on the grooming gangs, so-called.
00:01:17.720We'll get into all of the language and all of that.
00:01:19.600But the first thing we actually wanted to do is, I think we all recognise that a lot of people have, thank God, come across this issue in the last month.
00:01:27.840And a lot of people don't really know much about it.
00:01:30.820So we wanted to ask you, as someone who's done a lot of investigations into this, first and foremost, just to tell people, what are grooming gangs?
00:01:38.320How long have they been going on? How many people have been affected? You know, the numbers, the details, etc.
00:01:44.660So grooming gangs is a short, slangy term to refer to group-localised child sexual exploitation.
00:01:52.880It is a group-based form of child abuse.
00:01:56.080And there have been reports of this in various formats for forever, frankly.
00:02:01.840Groups have always gotten together to abuse children.
00:02:04.840But in Britain, there is a particular form of GLCSE, as it's known in the literature, as it were, which originated from the early 1960s,
00:02:15.260which is the first time we have records of this form of child abuse going on.
00:02:19.280And that is by predominantly South Asian, in particular Pakistani, Kashmiri, Myrpuri offenders targeting predominantly white working class girls,
00:02:29.280particularly in northern former mill towns, such as, say, Rotherham, Bradford, Huddersfield, and other parts of the country in the West Midlands as well,
00:02:41.780Reports became a little bit more common in the early 1970s, in particular from Rotherham.
00:02:46.720And then the trail kind of went silent in terms of reporting on this issue for quite a while until the early 2000s when a Labour MP in Keithley,
00:02:56.560which is a part of West Yorkshire near Bradford, in the Bradford district, called Anne Cryer,
00:03:01.120made a report that Pakistani men were targeting schoolgirls outside their school gates and luring them in, grooming them,
00:03:08.700making them believe that they were their boyfriends, that they had a positive, supportive relationship,
00:03:13.760and then quickly turning that boyfriend model of exploitation into an abusive one.
00:03:20.080When Anne Cryer raised these concerns, she was derided as a racist, and they were shut down very effectively by her own party.
00:03:28.500Senior figures, Labour Party apparatchiks, basically came down on her like a ton of bricks,
00:03:34.520and any effort that she might have made to expose this issue was pretty much extinguished straight away.
00:03:40.520The trail went cold again as a consequence of that.
00:03:43.820I think many people who may have come to Anne Cryer's defence saw the cultural and quite severe societal punishment she received for expressing these concerns,
00:16:43.480So I have good reason to believe that she wasn't actually groomed.
00:16:47.540And that actually it was another member of her family who was, but there was a mix up with the papers.
00:16:52.760But still, she was murdered by a Pakistani perpetrator linked, I believe, to the grooming of a family member of hers.
00:17:01.700More will come out about that in due course.
00:17:03.420Just another example of how little there is that's really been done on this issue that so many more of these stories need to be told.
00:17:08.440But you're right, so many of the girls and indeed the boys targeted by these gangs are easy to get at because they slipped through the net of the popular culture.
00:17:20.780Who do people really care about in this country?
00:17:22.640Frankly, white working class girls just aren't on that list.
00:17:43.720And so that's part of the reason why it happened.
00:17:45.660But I do think that's an insufficient explanation because I know, and they're not as prominent in the media coverage, and there aren't so many of them who want to come forward, but I know plenty of middle class victims of grooming gangs.
00:18:01.000And these are women now who speak to me in private, but for them there's an additional cost of admitting to this, I think.
00:18:07.660They've told me this because they feel as though their friends, by virtue of being middle class, would be even more likely to chastise them for saying, I've been targeted by Pakistani gangs when I was growing up.
00:18:18.400Because that sort of language is additionally policed at that class level.
00:18:24.200You've got a university education, you're talking about men raping you from, that can't possibly be an issue of, that's because they're men, not because they have any particular interest in you because they're Pakistani.
00:18:32.780So, I mean, I think the main problem here, the main issue, class is part of it, no doubt about it, huge part of it, but I do think that the ethnicity aspect has been more of a compelling driver behind this crime.
00:18:45.860And the fact of the matter is there's never been proper academic investigation or government-led investigation into this issue.
00:18:52.260This is surely one of the most fascinating areas for just study, to work out why this particular background is so over-represented in abusers, why these girls were targeted.
00:19:04.960People should be, like, knocking down the doors of every academic funding outfit in Europe, right, for all the world, begging for cash for this.
00:19:46.780And I think one of the reasons why we've seen this hesitancy for inquiry going on this month is because those people fear being named.
00:19:59.160So for background, we've had a few investigations into this, a few government investigations or government-sponsored investigations.
00:20:05.320As I said, we had that Rotherham one in 2014, we had another one in Rotherham a year later called the Casey Review, led by Louise Casey, which found that the councillors in the town were essentially covering up the abuse, which led to all of them being sacked and replaced, but nobody really being held to account.
00:20:19.960No one ever being prosecuted for that negligence.
00:20:22.600No police officers were ever also punished in Rotherham.
00:20:25.840The strongest punishment from the Independent Office of Police Conduct was a written warning after a seven-year-long review, longer than the Hillsborough investigation into misconduct by the police.
00:20:36.860We've also had that review in Telford, published in 2022.
00:20:50.100But again, nobody ever held to account.
00:20:52.160And none of those inquiries have been statutory, which means nobody's been compelled to give evidence.
00:20:56.860All of those investigations have been launched essentially by the people who are being investigated, which I think is not really a great way to go about investigation.
00:21:06.180I think it should be properly external.
00:21:08.200And obviously the people leading the investigation aren't linked to the councillors themselves, but they've commissioned them themselves.
00:21:14.660That doesn't really fill me with a great amount of trust.
00:21:16.660I think that's part of the reason why no one's ever been held to account, because the people running these investigations have never compelled witnesses.
00:21:22.340We also had a seven-year-long independent inquiry to child sexual abuse headed up by Professor Alexis Jay, the same academic and social worker who led the Rotherham-specific review in 2014, also led this national thing.
00:21:35.860Now, ICSA, as it has been called, looked at all forms of child abuse in the country for many decades.
00:21:42.960It looked at the Jimmy Savile scandal, a former BBC presenter.
00:21:45.840It looked at the children's care home crisis in this country.
00:22:09.800But the grooming gang scandal formed a subsection of a sub-report of ICSA on organised networks.
00:22:16.500They took hearings on this in, I think, 2020, no, 2018, sorry, September of 2018.
00:22:22.780Two weeks long, not a single victim of the grooming gangs gave any evidence.
00:22:27.620Nobody was compelled to give evidence.
00:22:30.260And they chose six areas to look into the scandal.
00:22:34.600None of those areas fit the pattern analysis for this form of child abuse.
00:22:38.820Every single one of the six areas that Alexis Jay's team looked at had an under-representation of Pakistanis against the national average versus the 2011 census, which is the most recent data they had available.
00:22:52.440None of those areas had a major prosecution or a successful trial of these forms of gangs.
00:22:57.760At this point, dozens of prosecutions had taken place across the country.
00:23:02.200There were certainly many towns to look at.
00:23:03.700For international listeners, they looked at Warwickshire, okay, which, if you don't know England, is, I suppose, like northern Virginia in the United States.
00:23:37.940They did not look at Bradford or Birmingham, where plenty of media reports had collated information demonstrating widespread forms of this abuse.
00:23:47.540But they deliberately chose to look at those places where none of this had happened.
00:23:51.700Well, on the opening day of the ICSA inquiry, Henrietta Hill, QC, the lead counsel to the inquiry, the lawyer, said that they felt it more appropriate, in this case, to look forward and not look back.
00:24:05.620In every single part of the ICSA inquiry, they looked back in all those other areas I discussed.
00:24:11.620But for grooming gangs, they thought it'd be best to look forward and find out what's going on in other parts of the country.
00:24:16.680So they literally took evidence from an area where there was no data, which was in South Wales.
00:24:21.020A police officer came along and said, oh, we've got no data of grooming gangs here.
00:24:25.040As it transpired, there are a few grooming gangs in South Wales, as there are in all parts of the country.
00:24:29.480So that revealed that the police, even in areas where this is underreported, aren't doing a good job.
00:24:34.120But we know that in the areas where this is a major issue, they're doing an even worse job and they are failing to collect data, failing to adequately prosecute people, failing to get to the heart of this crisis.
00:24:45.200Now, since the ICSA report was published in 2022, it was published during my investigation into the grooming gangs for GB News, none of it was useful.
00:24:56.440Charlie, sorry, let me pause you there because I don't want to skip over this thing that you're saying because I haven't heard this before.
00:25:03.320And I've looked into this issue, clearly not deeply enough, but the fact that this report deliberately did not look at the areas which are known to be the sources of the problem.
00:25:15.760I'm not a conspiratorial person, remotely, very anti-conspiratorial, actually.
00:25:21.820But when you were telling us that, my thinking is that cannot possibly be an accident.
00:33:40.720Yeah, it's mixing the clannishness with that particular attitude towards women in general,
00:33:48.060but really girls in particular, that they're sort of going through this process of being,
00:33:52.180you know, you're 11, you're fair game now.
00:33:54.520You've hit puberty, therefore that's time to start.
00:33:58.340Because that's what it's like for many of these communities where they're from.
00:34:01.480It's quite common for girls that age to start being treated as a woman when they reach that maturity of being 11.
00:34:08.600And remarkable is to say that, but that's quite a consistent view.
00:34:12.080We've not confronted that as a society because the facts are too painful for a national project of multiculturalism,
00:34:19.300which sees individuals as interchangeable and everything's fine.
00:34:23.040And you can just as easily integrate someone from mere pure as you can from Amsterdam.
00:34:27.680Everyone knows that not to be true in their hearts, but it's impossible to say it if you kind of prop up the regime on this issue.
00:34:34.220I've never felt like propping up that regime, in particular if it does lead to people covering up either actively or culturally what's going on here.
00:37:25.280Get home, knocking on the closest house you can get to, crying in the street.
00:37:28.320And they were trafficked around the country.
00:37:32.080Bradford's never had an investigation, but I've not met many survivors who said they haven't been trafficked to Bradford, and I've met lots of survivors.
00:37:39.140You can't actually possibly describe just how bad this is in terms of the treatment they endured, but what they experienced was able to be delivered because of that high trust tick in the box on a list.
00:37:55.260Charlie, and what percentage do we actually know were first generation immigrants, and what percentage were people who came here in the 1960s and were maybe first, second, even third generation immigrants?
00:38:09.300Well, wouldn't it be lovely for me to have that data straight to hand because the government had collected it very effectively over the years, and the Home Office had collected it from the police departments who'd accurately recorded ethnicity and immigration status?
00:38:20.460I can't answer that properly because our government has completely failed to be transparent and to collect that information in the first place.
00:38:27.140What I can tell you, though, from my own experience of attending trials and for going through court transcripts is that a significant minority are older men from the Pakistani community.
00:38:38.980But the real horror is the fact that a lot of men have been conditioned into this abuse through a family structure.
00:38:45.060And what's particularly distressing about that is that you often see brothers being involved in the abuse, young men, 20s and 30s, being involved in this sort of abuse.
00:38:54.940There are people who've been on trial alongside their family members in this, for example.
00:38:58.660I've been to trials recently where there were men in their 60s and men in their 30s, all in the same dock.
00:39:03.320Some of them requiring Urdu interpreters, the older ones, often referred to locally by people as freshies, fresh off the boat.
00:39:10.660Right. But there's a range. There's a range. It's a multi-generational crisis.
00:39:16.760And as well, there's also the criminal gang element.
00:39:20.320For instance, you were talking about how there was a criminal gang that dealt drugs and they had a grooming gang almost as a side hustle.
00:39:29.820Yeah. So in 2001, a Home Office researcher called Adele Weir went up to Rotherham to look into drug dealing there.
00:39:37.740And the drug dealing was going on. But what she found really was a pattern of child abuse and that these gangs were also running girls on the side.
00:39:45.300For a lot of them, it was just another form of criminality.
00:39:47.520The overlapping between organised criminality and child abuse and trafficking was very similar for these communities in particular.
00:39:56.820And that's also added to the hesitation from survivors to be able to adequately speak up.
00:40:03.220Now, I do think, I know other journalists have tried to prove this, other people have tried to show this.
00:40:08.740I am very convinced that in some of these places, there was active collusion between police officers, drug gangs and child abusers.
00:40:18.020From the police to protect the facilitation of child abuse and drug gangs because they were getting a bit on the side.
00:40:24.040Not just drugs, but girls as well. They were getting paid a little bit.
00:40:27.720And in your documentary, you talked about this as well.
00:40:31.200Yeah. Yeah. And there's more to come on this. All right. There's more to come on this.
00:40:35.860I'm chasing so many leads on this, but I think that's the next part of this scandal that's going to be exploded is the overlap between law enforcement and law breaking at the most heinous level.
00:40:47.860It will have to come out at some point because just in the last month or so, we've heard another report from the IOPC, which is the police watchdog.
00:40:59.980Whistleblowers from there have told journalists that their investigation into Rotherham was a cover up.
00:41:07.120They were told to look down, not up, and they were told to minimise their investigations.
00:41:11.400One of these whistleblowers, a very brave man on camera, said that he didn't think that report was worth the paper it was printed on.
00:41:18.180It was totally insufficient and survivors have been saying that for years, but it's different when someone inside the building says it, right?
00:41:25.320The overlapping criminality is central to this. These people are making money out of this abuse.
00:41:33.340One of the happiest parts that I've had of covering the story has been supporting a survivor who sued her perpetrator in a landmark case two years ago.
00:41:46.440She's called Elizabeth. She's from Rotherham. It's not a real name.
00:41:49.920She was abused by a man 20 years ago called Ashgar Bostan.
00:41:54.020He was up for parole yesterday, actually.
00:41:55.280He was sentenced in 2018 for a nine-year term because he had raped her when she was 13 in a den where she was kept for weeks.
00:42:06.900But she took him to court while he was in prison on a civil charge and she won £425,000.
00:42:16.640Money which he'll be able to hand over because like many of these perpetrators, there's a bit of cash there.
00:42:22.440A lot of these guys are quite successful. This is not some sort of like urchins from the community operation.
00:42:28.840These are upstanding members of the community as far as they're concerned and they suffer no punishment when they come out of prison.
00:42:34.440When they leave prison, another evidence of the clannishness and the security and the high trust of these communities,
00:42:40.720they go straight back to where they came from.
00:42:43.580They go straight back to their families, straight back to the old lines of work.
00:42:47.240Some of them, literally as if they'd never been to prison at all and with the jail sentences they've had.
00:42:53.920I mean, I'm aware of abusers of getting two and a half year sentences in 2015 in one gang in Leeds.
01:24:43.440am I going to speak to which experts will I get on that
01:24:45.220the hardest bit of any part of journalism is dissemination
01:24:49.480how do I get the story out who am I going to convince that they have to click on this story who's going to watch this interview you two are rather good at dissemination I'm not stressed you're doing well but when it comes to a story of this magnitude how you disseminate that how you
01:25:04.800it's really difficult and not much of a stats guy more of a human experiences person I've always thought that storytelling was the most compelling thing that's why I work in TV I think audiovisual experiences really make people realise what's going on certainly wrong in this case those voices are vital but what I found more often than not is tying them in with just the facts that we have already the data there's the pure data on prosecution it has made even my most
01:25:32.220liberal and well-meaning on open borders adjacent associates completely just go wow you're so right