TRIGGERnometry - The UNCENSORED Truth About Grooming Gangs - Charlie Peters

00:00:00.700 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:00:06.520 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,

00:00:11.780 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:00:15.780 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:00:22.660 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, The Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:00:27.120 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.

00:00:31.000 Fifty different towns and cities, they deliberately chose to look at those places where none of this had happened.

00:00:36.360 They felt it more appropriate, in this case, to look forward and not look back.

00:00:41.020 I think it was a deliberate choice to cover up the crisis.

00:00:44.400 It is the most horrendous abuse you can possibly describe.

00:00:47.460 Girls were set on fire. Girls endured fake executions, real executions.

00:00:52.160 In some of these places, there was active collusion between police officers, drug gangs, and child abusers.

00:01:00.440 From the police to protect the facilitation of child abuse and drug gangs, because they were getting a bit on the side.

00:01:06.080 Not just drugs, but girls as well. 1.00

00:01:07.360 Charlie, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:11.180 Thank you very much for having me.

00:01:12.000 You've been doing amazing coverage for a very long time, actually, on the grooming gangs, so-called.

00:01:17.720 We'll get into all of the language and all of that.

00:01:19.600 But 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.

00:01:27.840 And a lot of people don't really know much about it.

00:01:30.820 So 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?

00:01:38.320 How long have they been going on? How many people have been affected? You know, the numbers, the details, etc.

00:01:44.660 So grooming gangs is a short, slangy term to refer to group-localised child sexual exploitation.

00:01:52.880 It is a group-based form of child abuse.

00:01:56.080 And there have been reports of this in various formats for forever, frankly.

00:02:01.840 Groups have always gotten together to abuse children.

00:02:04.840 But 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,

00:02:15.260 which is the first time we have records of this form of child abuse going on.

00:02:19.280 And that is by predominantly South Asian, in particular Pakistani, Kashmiri, Myrpuri offenders targeting predominantly white working class girls,

00:02:29.280 particularly in northern former mill towns, such as, say, Rotherham, Bradford, Huddersfield, and other parts of the country in the West Midlands as well,

00:02:39.820 such as in Telford.

00:02:41.780 Reports became a little bit more common in the early 1970s, in particular from Rotherham.

00:02:46.720 And 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,

00:02:56.560 which is a part of West Yorkshire near Bradford, in the Bradford district, called Anne Cryer,

00:03:01.120 made a report that Pakistani men were targeting schoolgirls outside their school gates and luring them in, grooming them,

00:03:08.700 making them believe that they were their boyfriends, that they had a positive, supportive relationship,

00:03:13.760 and then quickly turning that boyfriend model of exploitation into an abusive one. 0.54

00:03:20.080 When Anne Cryer raised these concerns, she was derided as a racist, and they were shut down very effectively by her own party.

00:03:28.500 Senior figures, Labour Party apparatchiks, basically came down on her like a ton of bricks,

00:03:34.520 and any effort that she might have made to expose this issue was pretty much extinguished straight away.

00:03:40.520 The trail went cold again as a consequence of that.

00:03:43.820 I 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,

00:03:53.820 and they shied away.

00:03:54.780 It was a form of cultural censorship.

00:03:57.260 And then about five or six years later, a journalist at the Times called Andrew Norfolk,

00:04:03.020 who was based in the north of England at the time, where he was eventually northern editor and chief correspondent,

00:04:07.840 he was looking into these sorts of crimes.

00:04:11.660 And he has, since writing about this, said that the first time he made a report about the grooming gang scandal,

00:04:18.700 and in particular the difference between the predominant background of the offenders,

00:04:23.980 that being South Asian and Pakistani in particular,

00:04:27.000 and the over-representation of white girls in the victims, 0.94

00:04:31.120 meant that he felt this was a sort of a far-right fantasy.

00:04:33.560 He thought that this story was so destructive, and he actually sort of left it alone.

00:04:38.280 And then a few years after that, he said that he was driving from where he was based, in York,

00:04:44.720 up to Edinburgh for a weekend, just a nice weekend away from work.

00:04:49.560 While he was doing so, he heard a BBC radio bulletin from Manchester Crown Court,

00:04:54.360 and he heard about another one of these trials, fitting the exact same pattern that he'd heard about Alan Cryer saying in the early 2000s,

00:05:02.820 which he himself had written about a few years prior.

00:05:05.340 And then it sort of hit him, OK, what I missed a few years ago is actually a major, major crisis.

00:05:11.740 And so he began researching court records, looking into other allegations he'd heard.

00:05:16.040 And what he found was a national crisis of the pattern of this sign of abuse that was first reported briefly in the 60s,

00:05:24.260 again in the 70s, very much overtly by Alan Cryer, taking place right across the country.

00:05:29.120 But in order to expose the scandal more effectively and to show the extent of its horrors,

00:05:35.420 he chose one town where the most information was coming from.

00:05:37.740 That was Rotherham in South Yorkshire.

00:05:39.440 It's a few miles away from Sheffield as part of that South Yorkshire sort of unitary area.

00:05:43.580 And working with whistleblowers in the town, including Sammy Woodhouse, a victim of one of these abuse gangs,

00:05:52.020 and also Jane Senior, a then youth worker for a council-funded youth project called Risky Business.

00:05:59.660 He collated information that would expose the extent of the crisis in the town.

00:06:04.400 Over a number of years, he produced extremely compelling journalism,

00:06:07.580 some of the most first-rate investigations into group-based child abuse that, frankly, the world has ever seen.

00:06:13.020 It was severely impressive stuff, and it forced Rotherham to launch their own investigation.

00:06:20.400 For two years, they derided his work as lies of the Murdoch press.

00:06:23.400 They said this couldn't possibly be true.

00:06:25.040 Can you imagine that?

00:06:25.680 A reporter being told that your work is lies and slamming you as being a link to Murdoch

00:06:30.420 because he owns News UK and the paper he runs.

00:06:34.500 I can, actually, lately.

00:06:36.140 Yeah.

00:06:36.220 But it worked.

00:06:37.920 His reporting worked.

00:06:38.660 The bad publicity was so extensive and so severe that they couldn't ignore it.

00:06:42.440 Launched a review.

00:06:43.260 It was headed up by Professor Alexis Jay, and she found in this town between 1997 and 2013

00:06:48.600 that, at a conservative estimate, some 1,400 girls, predominantly girls, but children in general,

00:06:55.820 have been abused by these gangs over that period.

00:06:59.100 Rotherham is a small town, but it doesn't have a force field around it.

00:07:02.640 Girls were also being trafficked out of that area, and they were enduring some of the most horrific child abuse

00:07:10.220 that I think has ever been recorded in this country.

00:07:13.380 And details of the Jay Report are stomach-churning.

00:07:16.380 They are awful.

00:07:18.160 But it wasn't just the fact that the perpetrators were conducting this appalling abuse.

00:07:22.260 It was that it was being actively ignored by those who were meant to investigate this stuff.

00:07:28.740 Social workers looked the other way.

00:07:29.900 Senior elected politicians in the area chilled discussions about this.

00:07:34.980 They prioritised community cohesion over justice for girls who were being abused by predominantly Pakistani men.

00:07:42.020 And police officers who are duty-bound to investigate this sort of appalling abuse

00:07:47.120 were either totally failing to deal with it in any way because they had a sexist view of the girls

00:07:54.340 and a, frankly, racist view of how community cohesion should work.

00:07:59.440 Or they just, well, in some cases, they were sort of colluding in it themselves, right?

00:08:05.340 That's what was going on in Rotherham.

00:08:08.440 What Andrew Norfolk exposed in that town and what that report showed,

00:08:12.540 many people think it was just isolated to Rotherham.

00:08:14.560 And in the years since, what I got involved is I was 18 years old when the Jay Report came out

00:08:20.540 and I had a really lovely upbringing.

00:08:23.860 I was raised in Surrey and Hampshire.

00:08:25.960 Nothing really bad ever happened in my childhood.

00:08:28.560 I was enormously lucky.

00:08:30.940 My vision of England was one of Fields and Hedroes and the Royal Opera House and Ascot.

00:08:36.200 But I'm really lucky.

00:08:38.320 But my vision of England was ripped from my heart when I read the Jay Report.

00:08:43.980 I tried to put myself in the shoes of those children and thinking,

00:08:46.940 what must it be like to be taken from a children's home

00:08:49.760 or to have a police officer see you being abused and for them to do nothing?

00:08:55.720 It completely defiled what I understood about Britain in general,

00:09:00.420 and England in particular, being a place of liberty and protection from the state.

00:09:04.360 It crushed me in a way and got into journalism quite soon after.

00:09:10.240 And while I was studying in university, I always came back to this issue,

00:09:13.180 gathered a lot of personal research that I gathered over the years.

00:09:18.020 And as soon as I graduated, I got stuck into this crisis

00:09:20.960 because I wanted to show that beyond just a handful of local areas

00:09:26.700 that had been discovered already and what Andrew Norfolk did in Rotherham,

00:09:30.060 others from the Sunday Mirror did in Telford,

00:09:31.680 which also found thousands of victims over a similar period,

00:09:34.360 I wanted to show it wasn't just those areas,

00:09:36.440 that there were these reports happening all over the country.

00:09:38.880 I wanted to join the dots and show this was a national problem.

00:09:41.400 And so I pitched this idea of a proper investigation to GB News.

00:09:48.380 By that point, I was in my mid-twenties.

00:09:50.000 I had a few bylines.

00:09:52.180 I'd done a few stories as a reporter.

00:09:53.800 Charlie, can I just pause you there?

00:09:54.920 Because you did offer it to GB News.

00:09:56.840 Right.

00:09:57.200 I offered it to a lot of places.

00:09:58.240 Yeah, you offered it to a lot of places.

00:09:59.920 A lot of places.

00:10:00.620 And what was the response when you offered it?

00:10:02.240 Well, I don't know if anyone else had tried to make a documentary like this before.

00:10:06.240 There'd been lots of coverage in Rochdale, for example, Telford and Rotherham,

00:10:08.700 but there'd never been a national effort.

00:10:10.280 And when I tried to put this forward, and I had some pretty compelling stuff already,

00:10:13.920 nobody was interested.

00:10:16.200 Nobody was interested.

00:10:17.620 An editor, I'm told firsthand from a source at the meeting,

00:10:21.460 an editor at a major right-wing newspaper in this country said, 0.82

00:10:25.660 we don't want a film about Muslims being made by a white man.

00:10:29.820 That was the response to the pitch I'd already made,

00:10:32.280 which included exclusive interviews with survivors, their families,

00:10:36.700 which included revelations that had never been touched before,

00:10:40.520 people being named in failures and cover-ups that had never been named before.

00:10:45.860 Real exposure of ongoing problems, and people just could not give a toss.

00:10:51.260 Could not give a toss.

00:10:51.920 I don't think that's what happened at all.

00:10:54.280 It's not that they couldn't give a toss.

00:10:55.820 It sounds to me like they were very scared.

00:10:58.320 Well, only they can say.

00:10:59.980 But I think actually for a lot of people, this is a problem they can overlook.

00:11:02.380 They don't care.

00:11:03.480 Really?

00:11:03.980 Yeah, I do think so.

00:11:04.980 I think a lot of people literally do not care.

00:11:07.260 For the same reason that a lot of these officers and local officials

00:11:10.820 failed to investigate these girls because they had, and their concerns,

00:11:14.840 because they had misogynistic views of them being part of the underclass,

00:11:17.920 I think that feeling is still rife in the country today,

00:11:21.400 especially in some of the leading media houses of Britain in London.

00:11:24.600 When you think about the Me Too crisis erupting and everyone discussing

00:11:27.900 a whole range of issues in our sexual politics and how men and women interact,

00:11:33.140 at no point during that sort of cultural reckoning did any of those people think,

00:11:38.460 well, how can we turn this conversation into probably the greatest atrocity in this country

00:11:42.080 since the Second World War, tens of thousands of girls being abused?

00:11:44.700 So, yeah, I think they literally didn't care.

00:11:47.460 It's possible that they were scared as well, I'm sure. 0.99

00:11:49.620 The reason I say it is we don't want a documentary about Muslims raping white girls 0.99

00:11:56.760 or whatever the language was made by a white guy. 0.99

00:11:59.400 That doesn't sound to me like people not caring.

00:12:02.080 That sounds to me like the demographics of the issue are very, very inconvenient.

00:12:08.680 Sure.

00:12:08.940 But at the same time, they could have easily found someone else to make this film.

00:12:11.540 They couldn't have easily done it.

00:12:12.440 If they cared about it, they could have made it.

00:12:14.940 There's no, like most scandals in this country, they're just on the surface.

00:12:18.020 You don't have to be the greatest investigator ever to reveal this stuff.

00:12:21.680 It's all there.

00:12:22.360 You just have to put in the work and go and meet these people.

00:12:25.300 A lot of these documents are just lying in the open.

00:12:27.600 They're all being recorded.

00:12:29.240 Whistleblowers weren't hard to come across. 0.98

00:12:30.900 You just say, I'm doing this, and they come to you.

00:12:33.040 The collection element of this investigation has been quite straightforward.

00:12:36.600 These people have been crying out for years.

00:12:37.880 I have no formal journalistic training.

00:12:40.780 I just, I've learned on the job.

00:12:42.160 I've never made a documentary before I started making this one.

00:12:44.380 I sort of just worked with a mate to make it happen.

00:12:48.060 So we got some funding to take some time off and make it.

00:12:52.600 And then we pitched to GB News with this idea.

00:12:54.140 They're the only people who were interested in this story being told.

00:12:57.780 And what we showed after two years of investigation was that this was a national crisis.

00:13:04.280 We found over 50 different towns and cities that had been affected by this pattern of child abuse.

00:13:10.860 Looking through court records and compelling testimony from survivors all over the country.

00:13:16.000 From places that other outlets are just kind of ignored forever.

00:13:20.840 People from South Wales were speaking to us.

00:13:22.640 People from the southwest of England.

00:13:24.260 People just don't anticipate these places being as part of this conversation.

00:13:27.340 They always thought, oh, this is just Rochdale and Greater Manchester.

00:13:30.500 This was just Rotherham.

00:13:32.140 This was just Telford.

00:13:32.820 But actually, 50 different towns and cities.

00:13:34.960 It's a national crisis of its like that's never been reckoned with.

00:13:38.580 And what's your best estimate of the number of victims?

00:13:41.760 I've always said tens of thousands.

00:13:43.360 But the problem is that, you know, me and my friend who made this documentary with me, Guy Dampier,

00:13:49.020 we were just a two-man team looking into this.

00:13:50.800 I've said tens of thousands because in the handful of areas that we've had proper investigations,

00:13:57.640 they have found thousands of victims at a conservative estimate.

00:14:00.980 So if we found 50 different towns and cities, that's really concerning.

00:14:04.600 There's also never been a local review or a government review into Bradford,

00:14:08.600 probably the town that would dwarf all others.

00:14:11.520 Or Huddersfield, where there have been so many trials, many of them only concluding in recent weeks,

00:14:16.560 because they take so long to do and they're all linked, because the number of perpetrators is so large,

00:14:21.520 you can't actually do them all in one trial.

00:14:23.360 You have to do them over several trials over several years.

00:14:25.860 So I do think tens of thousands is a conservative estimate.

00:14:29.480 And every time this story breaks back into prominence,

00:14:33.760 as it has done probably for the most part ever in the last month,

00:14:37.940 more survivors come forward.

00:14:39.600 More people reach that moment of confidence that they can speak up.

00:14:42.720 And I think if there were a national inquiry, many more would come forward too.

00:14:46.560 It's worth pointing out to our international viewers and listeners that Bradford and Huddersfield are cities,

00:14:51.800 and Rotherham is a town.

00:14:53.300 So by population, they're going to be much larger, so potentially far more victims.

00:14:58.100 One of the most heinous aspects of this crime was how these perpetrators, these criminals,

00:15:05.800 targeted the most vulnerable girls in society, which I find absolutely heartbreaking.

00:15:11.240 I'd say to the first point, Oxford's a city.

00:15:15.460 They found many, many perpetrators there.

00:15:19.280 Several trials took place, but Rotherham still dwarfed it, and Rotherham's just a town.

00:15:24.740 So the pattern that we have found to demonstrate that this is an issue,

00:15:29.300 not really of the locality, it's more sort of who's in it.

00:15:32.260 So during the Rotherham crisis from 1997 to 2014, and we have very good evidence to believe it's ongoing, of course,

00:15:40.160 the Pakistani population was no more than 2% of the town.

00:15:44.560 And yet 1,400 girls, and well, mostly girls, have been abused.

00:15:49.420 Some boys were abused too.

00:15:50.640 Some non-white girls were abused too. 1.00

00:15:51.980 Sikh children were also part of this appalling scandal. 1.00

00:15:54.460 So the pattern's really clear, but the problem is the pattern completely flies in the face of what is acceptable to discuss

00:16:02.860 in terms of background and cultural motivators or ethnic motivators behind this sort of abuse.

00:16:10.100 So that's why it's always been skirted over.

00:16:12.240 Do you think part of the reason as well is a lot of these girls came from really underprivileged backgrounds? 0.98

00:16:18.000 They were very vulnerable.

00:16:19.260 They were in care homes.

00:16:20.120 One girl you talked about who ended up being murdered was somebody who had a very, very low IQ. 1.00

00:16:28.460 And so you look, there's a part of the authorities that, like you say, nobody's going to miss these girls.

00:16:36.940 You're speaking there about Laura Wilson.

00:16:39.260 Yes.

00:16:39.640 Who was murdered in Rotherham.

00:16:43.480 So I have good reason to believe that she wasn't actually groomed.

00:16:47.540 And that actually it was another member of her family who was, but there was a mix up with the papers.

00:16:52.760 But still, she was murdered by a Pakistani perpetrator linked, I believe, to the grooming of a family member of hers.

00:17:01.700 More will come out about that in due course.

00:17:03.420 Just 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.

00:17:08.440 But 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.

00:17:20.780 Who do people really care about in this country?

00:17:22.640 Frankly, white working class girls just aren't on that list. 1.00

00:17:26.300 They're just not there.

00:17:26.920 They're not even close.

00:17:27.560 Some of the children that were being abused are looked at as not just working class, but underclass.

00:17:33.260 So below level of interest from the state, from charities, from the government and its allies.

00:17:40.880 They just could not care less.

00:17:43.720 And so that's part of the reason why it happened.

00:17:45.660 But 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.

00:18:01.000 And these are women now who speak to me in private, but for them there's an additional cost of admitting to this, I think.

00:18:07.660 They'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.

00:18:18.400 Because that sort of language is additionally policed at that class level.

00:18:24.200 You'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.

00:18:32.780 So, 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.

00:18:45.860 And the fact of the matter is there's never been proper academic investigation or government-led investigation into this issue.

00:18:52.260 This 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.

00:19:03.700 Now, what is going on here?

00:19:04.960 People should be, like, knocking down the doors of every academic funding outfit in Europe, right, for all the world, begging for cash for this.

00:19:12.520 It's so interesting.

00:19:13.860 The grim details beyond, it's fascinating to know why this has happened.

00:19:17.220 But there's nothing there.

00:19:18.200 There's nothing there.

00:19:18.920 Well, most of the research I found is other stuff we've done ourselves at GB News or with my team, as I said, which is two people.

00:19:27.600 Or it's, you know, it's small sources around the country coming together to bring information, which we've collated ourselves.

00:19:34.200 Charlie, how much of the failing has been personal that we can pin on certain individuals?

00:19:39.460 And how much of it has been systemic?

00:19:41.920 I think systemic.

00:19:42.940 But there are guilty men and women in the country who've never been held to account.

00:19:45.960 There's no doubt about that.

00:19:46.780 And 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.

00:19:59.160 So for background, we've had a few investigations into this, a few government investigations or government-sponsored investigations.

00:20:05.320 As 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.

00:20:19.960 No one ever being prosecuted for that negligence.

00:20:22.600 No police officers were ever also punished in Rotherham.

00:20:25.840 The 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.

00:20:36.860 We've also had that review in Telford, published in 2022.

00:20:41.100 Again, no punishment for anyone.

00:20:42.520 And we've had a handful of local reports in Greater Manchester, commissioned by Andy Burnham, the mayor in Manchester.

00:20:48.800 That was in Rochdale and in Oldham.

00:20:50.100 But again, nobody ever held to account.

00:20:52.160 And none of those inquiries have been statutory, which means nobody's been compelled to give evidence.

00:20:56.860 All 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.

00:21:06.180 I think it should be properly external.

00:21:08.200 And obviously the people leading the investigation aren't linked to the councillors themselves, but they've commissioned them themselves.

00:21:14.660 That doesn't really fill me with a great amount of trust.

00:21:16.660 I 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.

00:21:22.340 We 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.

00:21:35.860 Now, ICSA, as it has been called, looked at all forms of child abuse in the country for many decades.

00:21:42.960 It looked at the Jimmy Savile scandal, a former BBC presenter.

00:21:45.840 It looked at the children's care home crisis in this country.

00:21:52.340 It looked at the Catholic Church.

00:21:54.260 It looked at all sorts of settings where abuse had gone, boarding schools, for example, state-sponsored boarding schools.

00:21:58.640 In all of those different mini-reports, ICSA looked back.

00:22:02.900 It looked back quite a while, and it gave thorough investigations.

00:22:07.040 Thousands of people gave evidence.

00:22:09.800 But the grooming gang scandal formed a subsection of a sub-report of ICSA on organised networks.

00:22:16.500 They took hearings on this in, I think, 2020, no, 2018, sorry, September of 2018.

00:22:22.780 Two weeks long, not a single victim of the grooming gangs gave any evidence.

00:22:27.620 Nobody was compelled to give evidence.

00:22:30.260 And they chose six areas to look into the scandal.

00:22:34.600 None of those areas fit the pattern analysis for this form of child abuse.

00:22:38.820 Every 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.

00:22:52.440 None of those areas had a major prosecution or a successful trial of these forms of gangs.

00:22:57.760 At this point, dozens of prosecutions had taken place across the country.

00:23:02.200 There were certainly many towns to look at.

00:23:03.700 For international listeners, they looked at Warwickshire, okay, which, if you don't know England, is, I suppose, like northern Virginia in the United States.

00:23:13.080 It's commutable to London.

00:23:14.580 It's quite beautiful.

00:23:15.520 It's quite rural.

00:23:16.320 You know, if you go a bit south, you've got sort of Richmond, Virginia, sort of that part of the neck of the woods.

00:23:20.500 Really cosy.

00:23:21.120 It's like Maryland, you know.

00:23:23.440 There's not a lot there in terms of urban life, right?

00:23:27.740 They looked at St. Helens in Merseyside.

00:23:29.660 It's like 99% white.

00:23:31.960 They looked at...

00:23:33.700 County Durham in the northeast.

00:23:35.720 Quaint part of England as well.

00:23:37.940 They did not look at Bradford or Birmingham, where plenty of media reports had collated information demonstrating widespread forms of this abuse.

00:23:47.540 But they deliberately chose to look at those places where none of this had happened.

00:23:51.380 Why?

00:23:51.700 Well, 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.

00:24:05.400 What?

00:24:05.620 In every single part of the ICSA inquiry, they looked back in all those other areas I discussed.

00:24:11.620 But 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.

00:24:16.680 So they literally took evidence from an area where there was no data, which was in South Wales.

00:24:21.020 A police officer came along and said, oh, we've got no data of grooming gangs here.

00:24:25.040 As it transpired, there are a few grooming gangs in South Wales, as there are in all parts of the country.

00:24:29.480 So that revealed that the police, even in areas where this is underreported, aren't doing a good job.

00:24:34.120 But 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.

00:24:45.200 Now, 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.

00:24:54.200 None of it was useful.

00:24:55.020 It found nothing new.

00:24:55.860 And so...

00:24:56.440 Charlie, 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.

00:25:03.320 And 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.

00:25:15.760 I'm not a conspiratorial person, remotely, very anti-conspiratorial, actually.

00:25:21.820 But when you were telling us that, my thinking is that cannot possibly be an accident.

00:25:26.660 Oh, it's entirely deliberate.

00:25:28.160 I've named it as being deliberate.

00:25:29.840 I think it was a deliberate choice to cover up the crisis.

00:25:32.480 It's a cover up.

00:25:33.080 It was kicking the issue down the can, putting it away, put it into long grass.

00:25:37.660 Somebody else will deal with that eventually.

00:25:39.740 And so, as this debate has caught back up again, people keep saying, oh, we've already had an inquiry.

00:25:44.800 The ICSA report.

00:25:46.060 Right.

00:25:46.300 Only a few politicians now are waking up to the fact that that was no inquiry.

00:25:49.880 That was a sham.

00:25:51.180 That was a cover up.

00:25:52.180 At the time, Andrew Norfolk, who was still working at the time as a reporter, who exposed the scandal in Rotherham,

00:25:56.920 he took quotes from survivors, campaigners, whistleblowers, etc., who he'd met over the years.

00:26:02.480 They described it as a cowardly reluctance to confront the issue.

00:26:06.620 Nobody cared.

00:26:07.800 It was an independent inquiry.

00:26:08.720 There was no political power to force it.

00:26:11.000 By this time, the independent inquiry had been through several different chairs, several different people heading it up.

00:26:15.880 Alexis Jay was maybe the fifth chair to look into. 0.73

00:26:18.560 It could have been the sixth.

00:26:19.220 I can't remember now.

00:26:19.740 There were so many.

00:26:20.900 One of the previous chairs was a judge from New Zealand.

00:26:24.280 They got rid of her in part because she was said to have noticed the pattern, the problem with people,

00:26:30.340 she described the Asian community, which in Britain usually refers to South Asians, such as those from Pakistan.

00:26:36.180 So, I mean, they just didn't do it.

00:26:37.960 They just did not do what they were meant to do.

00:26:39.760 So the organised network section of that inquiry just glossed over the grooming gangs entirely.

00:26:44.940 So let's get into the issue that we keep circling around, which it seems to me is at the very core of all of this,

00:26:53.120 which is the demographics of the perpetrators, the demographics of the survivors, the victims,

00:26:57.860 and how that ties into the kind of world we've been living in in which these things matter a lot.

00:27:03.720 You know, who the crime is committed by matters for some reason a lot, you know,

00:27:08.080 instead of just the crime has been committed and needs to be dealt with.

00:27:11.120 So one of the concerns that a lot of people have had,

00:27:13.720 and I think one of the reasons this issue has been under-discussed and under-covered in the media,

00:27:17.780 is the fear of provoking bigotry towards a particular community, so to speak.

00:27:25.240 And so the way people have talked about this is they try to broaden the conversation as much as possible, 0.97

00:27:33.760 up to and including saying most offences are committed by white people and all of this other ridiculous stuff. 0.97

00:27:39.320 But also there are people who say, well, it's a Muslim problem, when it's absolutely not a Muslim problem, clearly, right? 1.00

00:27:46.360 It's a problem with a very small subset of people from a very particular religious and geographical community, right? 0.86

00:27:54.200 So what do we know about the nature of the perpetrators?

00:27:57.900 Where are they from and what is motivating their behaviour?

00:28:00.880 Sure.

00:28:01.440 In the 1960s, Britain supported building a dam in Myrpur in northern Pakistan.

00:28:06.760 It flooded lots of places and tens of thousands of immigrants from Pakistan moved to Britain,

00:28:12.840 predominantly to work in the textiles industry in the mill towns in the north of England.

00:28:17.680 They settled in Bradford, which still has a significant textiles industry,

00:28:21.420 in Leicester and in other parts of Yorkshire in the north as well.

00:28:24.340 But with them, they also brought their dependents.

00:28:27.820 They brought immediate family members.

00:28:29.880 And Myrpur, the part of Kashmir, where many people came from as a district in northern Pakistan,

00:28:35.180 is very dissimilar to northern Europe in terms of attitudes around marriage, family structure, gender,

00:28:43.320 who has the power in a family, all the rest of it.

00:28:45.440 One of the particular differences between the English nuclear family,

00:28:51.480 which I think is quite unique actually to this island,

00:28:54.120 and the family structure of Kashmiris, is cousin marriage.

00:29:00.460 Cousin marriage is very common in Kashmir.

00:29:04.420 And as a consequence, it's now fairly common in England,

00:29:06.880 where many of these communities have settled.

00:29:10.180 Cousin marriage creates clannishness. 0.99

00:29:12.280 It creates a strange form of loyalty, of honour, links between people,

00:29:20.820 where you feel a duty to protect and serve people where you wouldn't normally in this society.

00:29:26.360 This created what we now call community leaders in England,

00:29:31.180 which refers to people elected via clans to represent them on their behalf

00:29:34.560 when there are political issues going forward.

00:29:36.320 This was vital for Pakistani mill workers in the 60s and 70s

00:29:40.540 when they needed representation in politics.

00:29:42.500 They would select from their clans.

00:29:45.100 I think you can still see this in modern politics today.

00:29:47.320 I think other people have adopted clannishness in this country.

00:29:50.340 That clannishness tied in with extremely sexist views about women 0.85

00:29:57.180 and extremely derogatory views about white women in particular

00:30:01.080 and their lifestyles that may be separate to girls from their South Asian heritage

00:30:06.560 generates a really dangerous cocktail

00:30:09.960 that I think has generated this over-representation of this form of abuse.

00:30:15.620 The reason why I think group-based offending is over-represented

00:30:19.540 so significantly among the British Pakistani community

00:30:22.680 is because there isn't a great sense of shame when they do it. 0.88

00:30:26.180 The reason why most offenders of child abuse in general in this country are white 0.99

00:30:30.020 is because they're mostly lone offenders. 0.96

00:30:31.900 What they're doing they know is shameful and they do it by themselves.

00:30:35.420 Most of it's online.

00:30:37.120 Where there is grooming, it's often by one person.

00:30:39.380 We've all seen those nonce hunter sting videos. 1.00

00:30:41.760 It's one bloke, pathetic creature, 0.99

00:30:44.200 being confronted by people in the street, on the path, wherever. 1.00

00:30:48.220 It's very different with this community, with Pakistanis. 1.00

00:30:50.720 They do it together.

00:30:51.980 There's no sort of,

00:30:52.720 why on earth are you grooming that 11-year-old girl at the school gates,

00:30:56.620 giving her sweets and then alcohol and then drugs,

00:31:01.220 compelling her into believing that she's your boyfriend

00:31:03.140 and then becoming extremely violent and torturing her for years

00:31:06.200 and ruining her life.

00:31:08.480 They pass them around.

00:31:09.480 They traffic them between different clans across the country.

00:31:12.880 That is the crux of why that particular form of behaviour is going on.

00:31:18.020 I think there may be some element of Islam that also affects them.

00:31:24.480 But I think it's a tiny part in comparison to the broader issue of the clannishness.

00:31:28.580 I mean, I've been in court cases where it's elements of Muslims referring to their faith

00:31:35.720 as the reason why they might abuse or why they can't wear protection.

00:31:39.500 In a sentencing in Rotherham in Sheffield Crown Court in 2017, for example,

00:31:42.840 two of the defendants shouted Allah Akbar as the judge handed down,

00:31:46.620 I think it was a 12 and 15 year sentence to two abusers, child rape, 12 years.

00:31:51.480 So, yes, that's why.

00:31:54.300 So, let's get into, sorry, France, I just want to clear this up

00:31:57.880 because I know a lot of people watching will say to both of us,

00:32:02.320 well, no, actually it's Muslims or whatever.

00:32:03.780 What I meant when I said it's clearly not an Islam issue.

00:32:06.240 I know what you mean.

00:32:06.520 What I meant was if you go to central London and you walk around and, I don't know,

00:32:11.880 you go to Harrods, it's full of Muslims, but they aren't doing grooming gangs.

00:32:16.300 Sure, I've never come across an Omani grooming gang in Britain, for example.

00:32:18.700 That's what I'm saying, right?

00:32:19.620 So, it's clearly more specific than that.

00:32:21.840 And what you talked about there, the clannishness, the cousin marriage, 0.94

00:32:25.180 we've got a great discussion with Matthew Saeed,

00:32:28.200 who's himself of a Pakistani background, coming up soon.

00:32:32.560 And we talked about cousin marriage a lot with him.

00:32:34.960 So, but what I want to get to is how do you get from clannishness?

00:32:41.840 And look, I'm from Eastern Europe.

00:32:43.880 People are very, very kind of familial tribal, no cousin marriage, but nonetheless,

00:32:48.660 the family, extended family is really important.

00:32:51.380 And many, many people would rather give a job to the incompetent son-in-law

00:32:56.040 than to somebody who's competent but isn't related to them, right?

00:33:00.200 But how do you get from that clannishness to what you said, which is a lack of shame?

00:33:06.920 Where does that lack of shame come from?

00:33:09.400 I think it's tied up in the additional element of the additional part of the cocktail that I refer to,

00:33:14.360 which is the extremely negative views of the girls. 1.00

00:33:17.780 They are referred to regularly in court transcripts and trials I've attended, survivors I've met. 0.99

00:33:24.560 They'll always say, we were referred to as fresh meat, as slags, as sluts, as worthy of the punishment. 0.98

00:33:31.440 They don't actually see what they're doing as shameful because they think the girls deserve it. 0.99

00:33:36.140 They dress in a certain way.

00:33:37.640 They got drunk.

00:33:38.580 They met them at a park.

00:33:39.820 Well, they deserve it.

00:33:40.720 Yeah, it's mixing the clannishness with that particular attitude towards women in general, 0.99

00:33:48.060 but really girls in particular, that they're sort of going through this process of being,

00:33:52.180 you know, you're 11, you're fair game now.

00:33:54.520 You've hit puberty, therefore that's time to start.

00:33:58.340 Because that's what it's like for many of these communities where they're from.

00:34:01.480 It's quite common for girls that age to start being treated as a woman when they reach that maturity of being 11.

00:34:08.600 And remarkable is to say that, but that's quite a consistent view.

00:34:12.080 We've not confronted that as a society because the facts are too painful for a national project of multiculturalism,

00:34:19.300 which sees individuals as interchangeable and everything's fine.

00:34:23.040 And you can just as easily integrate someone from mere pure as you can from Amsterdam.

00:34:27.680 Everyone 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.

00:34:34.220 I'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.

00:34:42.220 But that's in effect what's happened.

00:34:43.940 So I really do think the cultural attitude towards those girls, inspired, I think, by racism.

00:34:49.740 They look at white girls as being fair game because they are white. 0.99

00:34:54.280 And that's not to say they don't abuse other girls.

00:34:56.480 There are Sikh girls who are targeted as well.

00:34:58.100 And I think that is some sort of ethno-religious attack.

00:35:02.820 One of the great joys, actually, of this investigation is being able to promote Sikh voices in this issue who've been ignored

00:35:10.240 because it doesn't fit the narrative for other people who'd rather talk about this only as a white girls issue. 0.99

00:35:14.480 But this does actually affect other communities in a similar way.

00:35:18.060 And also, other Pakistani girls were abused, often in the family setting.

00:35:22.220 Many of the abusers that we know, for example, in Greater Manchester, were attacking their own relatives, their nieces in one case,

00:35:28.720 while also going around and attacking white girls. 0.97

00:35:32.160 There's one example I want to bring. 0.89

00:35:33.520 It's truly horrendous, but it gets to the point of what I'm talking about, honour and shame.

00:35:37.960 There was a house in a part of Rochdale where one of the grooming gang abusers had a list on a door.

00:35:46.720 People could write their names on this list and they would tick next to their name whenever they'd visited.

00:35:54.960 And inside this house, girls were kept on sordid mattresses and filthy squalid flats and they were kept ready for sexual abuse. 1.00

00:36:04.580 Girls in that building described being passed around like a bull around hordes of men who would turn up. 1.00

00:36:10.120 At the end of the month, the man running that property would collect money from them based on the number of ticks they left.

00:36:17.580 It's like a paedophile honesty box.

00:36:20.780 That's clannishness.

00:36:22.000 That is a high trust organisation.

00:36:24.680 I believe you to leave a tick when you go in there and attack a 12-year-old girl and degrade her in the most appalling ways.

00:36:30.380 And some of the abuse, I mean, I don't know what moderation you guys have on this, but I will just say, I mean, they were tortured, right? 0.86

00:36:36.560 Girls were anally gang raped, okay? 1.00

00:36:39.500 It is the most horrendous abuse you can possibly describe.

00:36:42.940 One girl in Oxford, for example, part of the Operation Bullfinch investigation from Thames Valley Police,

00:36:49.200 one girl had the initials of her abuser branded with a hot iron on the cheeks, branded on her, literally made to be property to an abuser.

00:36:59.240 One girl was kept in a cage and told to bark like a dog. 1.00

00:37:03.620 Girls were killed, girls were set on fire.

00:37:05.760 Girls endured fake executions, real executions. 0.86

00:37:09.500 Girls were abandoned in the moors in Greater Manchester, little to no clothing, and told to make their way home.

00:37:17.080 If you've been to the moors of Manchester, it's pretty brutal.

00:37:19.040 It's like arid.

00:37:20.340 It's like English desert.

00:37:22.060 Left alone, windswept, austere.

00:37:24.280 Brutal.

00:37:25.280 Get home, knocking on the closest house you can get to, crying in the street.

00:37:28.320 And they were trafficked around the country.

00:37:32.080 Bradford'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.

00:37:39.140 You 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.

00:37:55.260 Charlie, 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?

00:38:09.300 Well, 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?

00:38:20.460 I can't answer that properly because our government has completely failed to be transparent and to collect that information in the first place.

00:38:27.140 What 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.

00:38:38.980 But the real horror is the fact that a lot of men have been conditioned into this abuse through a family structure.

00:38:45.060 And 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.

00:38:54.940 There are people who've been on trial alongside their family members in this, for example.

00:38:58.660 I've been to trials recently where there were men in their 60s and men in their 30s, all in the same dock.

00:39:03.320 Some of them requiring Urdu interpreters, the older ones, often referred to locally by people as freshies, fresh off the boat.

00:39:10.660 Right. But there's a range. There's a range. It's a multi-generational crisis.

00:39:16.760 And as well, there's also the criminal gang element.

00:39:20.320 For 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.

00:39:29.820 Yeah. So in 2001, a Home Office researcher called Adele Weir went up to Rotherham to look into drug dealing there.

00:39:37.740 And 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.

00:39:45.300 For a lot of them, it was just another form of criminality.

00:39:47.520 The overlapping between organised criminality and child abuse and trafficking was very similar for these communities in particular.

00:39:56.820 And that's also added to the hesitation from survivors to be able to adequately speak up.

00:40:03.220 Now, I do think, I know other journalists have tried to prove this, other people have tried to show this.

00:40:08.740 I am very convinced that in some of these places, there was active collusion between police officers, drug gangs and child abusers.

00:40:18.020 From the police to protect the facilitation of child abuse and drug gangs because they were getting a bit on the side.

00:40:24.040 Not just drugs, but girls as well. They were getting paid a little bit. 1.00

00:40:27.720 And in your documentary, you talked about this as well.

00:40:31.200 Yeah. Yeah. And there's more to come on this. All right. There's more to come on this.

00:40:35.860 I'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.

00:40:47.860 It 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.

00:40:57.800 They investigate police officers.

00:40:59.980 Whistleblowers from there have told journalists that their investigation into Rotherham was a cover up.

00:41:07.120 They were told to look down, not up, and they were told to minimise their investigations.

00:41:11.400 One 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.

00:41:18.180 It was totally insufficient and survivors have been saying that for years, but it's different when someone inside the building says it, right?

00:41:25.320 The overlapping criminality is central to this. These people are making money out of this abuse.

00:41:32.480 A lot of these men are quite rich.

00:41:33.340 One 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.

00:41:46.440 She's called Elizabeth. She's from Rotherham. It's not a real name.

00:41:49.920 She was abused by a man 20 years ago called Ashgar Bostan.

00:41:54.020 He was up for parole yesterday, actually.

00:41:55.280 He 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.

00:42:06.900 But she took him to court while he was in prison on a civil charge and she won £425,000.

00:42:16.640 Money which he'll be able to hand over because like many of these perpetrators, there's a bit of cash there.

00:42:22.440 A lot of these guys are quite successful. This is not some sort of like urchins from the community operation.

00:42:28.840 These are upstanding members of the community as far as they're concerned and they suffer no punishment when they come out of prison.

00:42:34.440 When they leave prison, another evidence of the clannishness and the security and the high trust of these communities, 0.51

00:42:40.720 they go straight back to where they came from.

00:42:43.580 They go straight back to their families, straight back to the old lines of work. 0.67

00:42:47.240 Some of them, literally as if they'd never been to prison at all and with the jail sentences they've had.

00:42:53.920 I mean, I'm aware of abusers of getting two and a half year sentences in 2015 in one gang in Leeds.

00:42:58.740 Straight out again.

00:43:02.320 Two weeks ago I revealed that a grooming gang abuser in Leeds called Abid Eunice

00:43:07.080 was trying to open a children's care home.

00:43:10.820 Can you imagine, can you imagine ever allowing someone who owns a home, 0.86

00:43:16.220 who has a grooming gang conviction, who's been to prison for grooming a 12-year-old girl

00:43:21.020 and abusing her with a gang of at least 10 other men and being like,

00:43:24.320 yeah, I want to run a care home with that chap.

00:43:26.940 No.

00:43:27.780 But for this community,

00:43:30.020 forgivable, permissible, possible as well.

00:43:33.960 And there's another infuriating element is that there are people who have committed heinous crimes

00:43:39.560 who aren't British citizens, who are Pakistani nationals,

00:43:44.640 and we can't deport them.

00:43:46.020 So they commit horrendous crimes and we can't even deport them.

00:43:50.380 There are two men in particular who keep getting attention on this.

00:43:53.460 One of them is called Kari Ralph.

00:43:54.660 He's in Rochdale and his associate.

00:43:56.540 They're in Rochdale.

00:43:57.800 They're imprisoned as far as the first round of the Rochdale prosecutions

00:44:00.820 led by a prosecutor called Nazir Afzal.

00:44:02.580 They were prosecuted by a British Pakistani.

00:44:06.540 And they got out of prison.

00:44:09.780 They were set for deportation.

00:44:11.480 They'd had their British nationality stripped by their home secretary.

00:44:15.840 But with legal aid, hundreds of thousands of pounds,

00:44:17.700 they've successfully fought against deportation for years,

00:44:20.880 well over a decade now,

00:44:22.420 because of the European Convention of Human Rights,

00:44:25.360 their right to family life.

00:44:26.580 Can you imagine that?

00:44:27.280 Their right to family life, having attacked children.

00:44:28.940 It's like satire almost.

00:44:30.700 It's so horrendous.

00:44:31.840 And they've successfully done so.

00:44:33.780 Through my own research and survivors I've met and cases I've followed up,

00:44:37.240 I know of more cases where perpetrators have fled justice

00:44:42.680 because they know what's coming,

00:44:44.660 then have been deported after a prosecution.

00:44:46.900 I know more cases of people voluntarily going back to Pakistan

00:44:51.320 because there's no extradition treaty there.

00:44:53.540 They won't get me.

00:44:54.660 Then have been actually kicked out of the country for their crimes.

00:44:58.220 One of them knows that he's gone back and I'll,

00:45:00.760 you know, I'd love to go out and knock on his door.

00:45:02.420 But there's no point because the states won't go and pick him up

00:45:05.460 because they can't.

00:45:07.300 Under the 2022 Nationality and Borders Act,

00:45:10.520 the government has powers to issue visa penalties

00:45:13.700 and foreign aid restrictions on countries

00:45:15.780 that refuse to accept deportations.

00:45:18.480 The government should do it for Pakistan, don't you think? 0.90

00:45:20.400 If they're refusing to accept these perpetrators being deported,

00:45:23.340 why do we keep giving them millions in foreign aid

00:45:25.060 and permitting them tens of thousands of visas to come

00:45:27.940 and let people move to this country?

00:45:29.940 But perhaps, perhaps the government's quite weak on this.

00:45:32.860 Perhaps it has been for a long time.

00:45:34.300 This is the thing about this story is it's like at every layer

00:45:38.060 and at every level there's something awful and more awful

00:45:41.540 and more awful going on.

00:45:42.880 And you're just going, these, and what I don't understand,

00:45:46.000 and this is where I think the clash between a normal person's

00:45:50.120 expectations of the justice system and the reality really happens

00:45:54.520 because you're going, you mentioned two and a half years,

00:45:58.300 but when you said, you know, this guy had been convicted

00:46:00.100 of raping a 12-year-old with other men and they got nine years,

00:46:03.920 in my head I'm going, what, nine years? 0.97

00:46:05.700 Yes, yes.

00:46:07.240 How?

00:46:08.100 It's like I think most people when they think about somebody

00:46:11.620 committing those crimes, being caught, being found guilty,

00:46:15.740 being sentenced.

00:46:16.900 You think they're getting 25, 30, 50 years, whatever it is,

00:46:20.800 and then they're getting nine years probably coming out

00:46:23.240 on parole earlier.

00:46:24.520 Oh, yeah.

00:46:24.820 It's like what the hell is going on?

00:46:25.980 Ashkar Bostai, that man I mentioned who got the nine years,

00:46:27.960 he's actually, he was recalled to prison.

00:46:30.200 He was released after four years of his nine-year sentence

00:46:33.100 and a part of that time was spent in an open prison.

00:46:36.180 He was allowed to leave, right?

00:46:37.980 And the victim of his abuse wasn't told.

00:46:40.280 Another example of huge state failure.

00:46:42.500 He was recalled in January of last year because he was seen

00:46:46.660 within a mile of his victim's house back in prison.

00:46:48.900 He may come out again later this year.

00:46:50.580 His hearing was yesterday.

00:46:52.060 He had to be confronted by the survivor.

00:46:54.960 She was forced to make a statement against why he shouldn't

00:46:56.860 be released on camera.

00:46:57.720 How appalling is that?

00:46:59.320 A man who wrecked you when you were 30 and you have to make

00:47:02.340 the case that he stays in.

00:47:03.620 He's still within that nine-year term.

00:47:05.740 He's still within that nine-year term and she has to plead

00:47:08.460 with the parole board to not let him out.

00:47:11.020 Twice she's had to do this now.

00:47:12.100 And Charlie, is part of the reason for this, I mean,

00:47:14.980 people will say we have lax laws or whatever,

00:47:17.760 but is part of the reasons for this, Dr Ella Hill,

00:47:21.120 who we had, who is a survivor, she explained to us

00:47:25.120 for the first time, I really hadn't known neither

00:47:27.600 of us really knew much about, that in actual fact,

00:47:31.180 the one thing that got totally missed in all of this

00:47:33.580 by the media very often and by others is that in many,

00:47:37.460 many cases, perhaps not always, but in most cases,

00:47:40.080 these were racially aggravated hate crimes.

00:47:43.500 And it's one of the reasons that they're getting sentences

00:47:45.860 of two and a half, nine, whatever years,

00:47:48.720 is that these crimes haven't been prosecuted

00:47:50.580 for the crimes that they actually are.

00:47:52.320 So I think it's really key that they aren't recognised

00:47:54.880 as racially aggravated offences in a lot of cases.

00:47:57.600 I think a lot of survivors are giving evidence

00:47:59.620 to police officers to demonstrate that

00:48:02.620 and they're not choosing to do so because we have

00:48:04.740 this horrendous hierarchy of racism,

00:48:07.120 where if you're white, you can't possibly be a victim

00:48:09.780 of racism, so it's just gone.

00:48:12.060 It's removed from the possibility.

00:48:14.080 I'm aware of just two cases where racially aggravated

00:48:17.960 factors have been added to prosecutions

00:48:19.620 and there have been many, many successful prosecutions.

00:48:21.880 I'm aware of many more than two survivors

00:48:24.680 who have endured racialised elements to their abuse

00:48:28.640 and then being specifically referred to being white

00:48:31.840 and a target or kafir, all that sort of language

00:48:34.480 about their suffering.

00:48:36.140 So it just doesn't match.

00:48:37.860 Is that a part of the reason why the sentences

00:48:39.240 aren't good enough?

00:48:40.500 It'd be a useful cop-out for the judges to say that,

00:48:44.220 but it's not because, I mean, two weeks ago

00:48:46.560 in Bradford Crown Court, one man for child rape,

00:48:50.160 several counts of child rape actually,

00:48:52.020 was sentenced to, again, a eight or nine year term

00:48:54.640 and in his mitigation, the judge said,

00:48:57.140 well, this man, clearly very reformed

00:48:58.980 because he is regularly seen at the mosque

00:49:01.220 where he's acting very well.

00:49:03.200 It's insane that you would use that as mitigation

00:49:05.260 and that it would be accepted.

00:49:06.200 I think most people would expect the judge

00:49:08.320 to completely disregard those mitigating pleas,

00:49:10.480 but in this case, the defence barrister won him over

00:49:12.780 and his sentence was adjusted accordingly.

00:49:15.500 But having said that, in September,

00:49:16.940 I was at Sheffield Crown Court,

00:49:18.380 a regular haunt for me now,

00:49:19.780 considering the number of trials going through

00:49:21.020 in the recent years.

00:49:22.040 A sentencing happened where a man got 26 years.

00:49:24.980 He's appealing that sentence.

00:49:26.200 Again, similar charges, child rape, trafficking,

00:49:29.060 exploitation, 26 years.

00:49:31.520 Sentences do have guidelines.

00:49:33.560 The judges have guidelines they have to act to,

00:49:35.140 but there is some leeway there

00:49:36.500 and they can aggravate and mitigate

00:49:39.420 according to the pleas of counsel.

00:49:42.000 It just depends on what you accept,

00:49:44.180 what you permit.

00:49:45.340 Some judges permit more than others,

00:49:47.000 but that 25 year, 26 year term I mentioned,

00:49:50.420 I'm of the mind that it'll probably get reduced.

00:49:52.360 I'm also of the mind that despite him

00:49:53.600 almost certainly being a dual national,

00:49:56.000 he won't be deported.

00:49:57.020 In that, I was the only reporter in that sentencing,

00:49:59.560 which is a scandal in itself

00:50:01.740 because 106 years were being handed down

00:50:04.020 to seven defendants,

00:50:05.320 one of the most significant grooming gang trials

00:50:07.360 in modern history.

00:50:08.400 Nobody else was there.

00:50:10.500 The survivor in that case,

00:50:12.180 an extraordinarily brave woman,

00:50:13.380 I'm proud to call her friend,

00:50:14.660 gave her victim impact statement

00:50:16.460 where she's allowed to address the defendants.

00:50:20.360 Best thing I've ever witnessed in my life.

00:50:21.720 I found myself smiling listening to her speak

00:50:25.180 because it was so compelling.

00:50:27.180 I didn't look up.

00:50:28.340 It's an open court,

00:50:29.160 but for international audiences,

00:50:30.940 nothing is recorded in British courts.

00:50:33.420 Some sentencings of the judge's remarks

00:50:35.380 are televised for big cases.

00:50:37.340 This wasn't, didn't count for some reason,

00:50:39.620 but the victim impact statement,

00:50:42.100 unless a reporter is there to record it,

00:50:44.460 no one will ever know it happened

00:50:45.700 unless you pay for a transcript

00:50:47.340 and that can be tens of thousands of pounds.

00:50:49.180 Really difficult to get.

00:50:50.000 So I felt a bit of a duty there actually

00:50:51.680 to get my head down

00:50:53.300 and just tap everything out.

00:50:56.220 I'm not so good on shorthand.

00:50:57.420 I'm more of a typist.

00:50:58.920 And you also have to check against delivery.

00:51:02.600 You can request copies of what's being said

00:51:04.220 every time when the prosecutor speaks,

00:51:06.480 you get a copy of his opening notes

00:51:07.920 or her opening notes.

00:51:08.880 She delivers the case against the defendants.

00:51:10.540 But if you just copy and paste from that,

00:51:13.520 the CPS will be all over you

00:51:14.880 because if it's not what was said in court,

00:51:17.940 it's wrong.

00:51:18.640 You've committed a journalistic breach.

00:51:21.520 I had to make sure that every single word

00:51:23.400 that she said was spot on.

00:51:24.820 So I just typed out thousands of words,

00:51:27.440 15 minutes.

00:51:28.300 It was incredible.

00:51:29.280 She told them,

00:51:30.860 you stole my childhood.

00:51:33.160 Now I'm taking away your freedom.

00:51:35.260 I am your karma.

00:51:36.480 That was her ending line.

00:51:39.240 Yeah.

00:51:39.780 And they were face it.

00:51:40.440 They were like this, glum.

00:51:41.280 And then the public gallery packed to the rafters

00:51:44.200 with supporting family members,

00:51:45.660 I should add,

00:51:46.280 clannishness.

00:51:47.220 One of them outraged,

00:51:48.740 leaving while the sentence were handed down.

00:51:50.920 One of the abusers in that trial,

00:51:52.760 given that 26-year term,

00:51:54.280 as he stood up to leave,

00:51:55.280 daughter shouted, 0.98

00:51:56.080 I love you, dad.

00:51:58.180 Just can't imagine it.

00:51:59.480 Just can't imagine it for a different community,

00:52:01.380 really.

00:52:02.620 And she did that.

00:52:04.940 But at the end of that,

00:52:06.180 I realised that what was in the statement

00:52:10.100 I had in front of me from the CPS

00:52:11.640 and what she said were different.

00:52:14.920 It was an element that had been taken out.

00:52:16.700 And I heard the judge conferring

00:52:18.980 with the prosecuting barrister,

00:52:21.040 and they said,

00:52:21.780 and that matter, of course,

00:52:23.220 before we hear a statement from the survivor,

00:52:25.680 that's one for the Home Office,

00:52:26.880 not for this court.

00:52:27.500 We can leave it be.

00:52:28.780 Turns out,

00:52:29.880 she had requested in her victim impact

00:52:31.560 statement for her defendants to be deported,

00:52:34.500 and they censored it.

00:52:35.920 They removed it from her statement.

00:52:37.740 She was not allowed to stand up in open court,

00:52:41.480 having been abused as an 11-year-old girl,

00:52:43.620 gang raped in taxis, 0.67

00:52:44.700 abused by over 100 men by the time she was 16.

00:52:48.140 There, some of them were receiving British justice,

00:52:52.100 very long overdue.

00:52:53.700 And she was told,

00:52:54.560 you can't say that.

00:52:55.600 You actually can't call on them to be deported.

00:52:57.920 The state should do everything it can

00:53:01.640 to facilitate these girls 0.98

00:53:03.000 being able to deliver

00:53:04.800 and say whatever they want

00:53:06.160 and to get the sort of justice

00:53:07.440 they've been denied for decades.

00:53:08.940 And that they were censoring her.

00:53:10.660 It was quite remarkable

00:53:11.600 to see them openly conferring about it.

00:53:13.340 And I think they were hoping

00:53:14.040 that I hadn't picked up on it,

00:53:15.180 but I had.

00:53:16.940 And I spoke after with her.

00:53:18.100 And she was like,

00:53:18.420 yeah, that was what I wanted to say.

00:53:19.880 Couldn't do it.

00:53:21.180 And do you know what?

00:53:21.580 They probably won't be deported.

00:53:22.940 So what's the point in her saying it anyway?

00:53:25.280 Because it won't ever happen.

00:53:27.340 Do you know,

00:53:27.700 that's probably one of the most disgusting things 0.96

00:53:29.500 that anyone has ever told me about anything.

00:53:32.920 Yeah.

00:53:33.800 I wish it were an outlier.

00:53:35.000 And I think one of the problems

00:53:35.740 I've had covering this issue

00:53:36.840 for so many years is that,

00:53:39.640 Eli, hearing you saying that,

00:53:40.600 I mean,

00:53:42.000 it wasn't for me.

00:53:43.480 Like I've heard so many appalling things now

00:53:46.700 that when I hear stuff,

00:53:47.720 I almost have to check against it

00:53:50.140 with a colleague to be like,

00:53:51.360 what do you make of this?

00:53:52.120 And they're like,

00:53:52.320 well, that's horrendous.

00:53:53.100 It does numb you to the severity of this

00:53:56.620 because you think

00:53:57.680 what is an outlier for one person's life

00:54:01.160 is actually quite constant

00:54:02.740 for a lot of lives that you've met.

00:54:04.580 When you think there are tens of thousands of victims,

00:54:06.640 when you hear these stories all the time,

00:54:08.400 you have to really,

00:54:10.000 not just emotionally regulate yourself

00:54:11.400 to what you're hearing,

00:54:12.400 but also to recognise that it's not normal.

00:54:15.540 Well, this is my point.

00:54:17.120 Obviously,

00:54:17.640 I'm worried it is normal.

00:54:18.760 I'm worried it is normal.

00:54:19.260 The abuse itself is obviously the worst thing

00:54:21.240 about this case

00:54:21.900 and nobody should say anything other than that.

00:54:25.740 But I guess,

00:54:26.880 you know what I mean

00:54:27.900 when I say it's the most disgusting thing

00:54:29.280 that I've ever heard?

00:54:32.080 We all know that we live in a society

00:54:33.880 where certain truths

00:54:35.220 can't be spoken out loud in public.

00:54:36.680 But if you've been gang-raped as a child

00:54:40.880 and you are having your day in court

00:54:43.980 and even in that context,

00:54:48.480 you, the victim,

00:54:50.020 are not allowed to express your opinion

00:54:52.420 about what should happen to these people

00:54:54.300 because it's racist

00:54:57.240 or whatever it is.

00:54:58.720 I don't even know

00:54:59.680 that wanting to deport criminals

00:55:01.240 is in any way discriminatory.

00:55:03.580 I'm a foreign person.

00:55:05.300 And if I committed crimes like that,

00:55:07.760 I should absolutely be stripped

00:55:08.920 of my nationality and sent back.

00:55:11.740 But the fact that

00:55:13.220 the people who represent our state

00:55:17.140 in this instance,

00:55:18.820 whose job it is to deliver justice,

00:55:21.360 care about that

00:55:22.880 and want to keep survivors

00:55:25.880 from expressing that sentiment,

00:55:28.320 I think that's outrageous. 0.51

00:55:29.960 I think it's disgusting.

00:55:31.200 A very good friend of mine is Maggie Oliver.

00:55:32.440 The whistleblower from Rochdale

00:55:35.400 who exposed the scandal there.

00:55:37.020 Great detective constable

00:55:38.020 who sort of blew the lid

00:55:38.960 on what was going there

00:55:39.600 and has led to many investigations

00:55:42.080 in Greater Manchester.

00:55:43.180 She's always told me over many years,

00:55:45.140 all too often,

00:55:45.960 in fact, always,

00:55:47.280 the state will prioritise

00:55:48.660 human rights of the perpetrators

00:55:50.620 over those of the victims.

00:55:53.280 And I find that

00:55:54.280 the state is very happy

00:55:56.040 to be precise and legalistic

00:55:57.780 about so many things

00:55:59.060 about,

00:56:00.100 oh, you can't say that in the court.

00:56:01.020 But when it comes to the actual overall job

00:56:03.200 of ensuring justice,

00:56:05.480 little bits and bobs just go missing.

00:56:08.140 So in Maggie's case,

00:56:09.720 what she found about

00:56:10.600 what was going on in Rochdale,

00:56:12.380 for example,

00:56:13.780 there was a gold-level meeting

00:56:15.940 which has been held

00:56:16.540 by very senior officers

00:56:17.460 at Greater Manchester Police.

00:56:19.200 And they made a decision

00:56:20.740 to shut down an investigation

00:56:21.860 into child abuse at the time,

00:56:23.120 even though there was clearly

00:56:24.620 a massive problem

00:56:25.140 that identified hundreds

00:56:26.600 of perpetrators,

00:56:28.120 many of whom will now

00:56:28.980 currently be walking free

00:56:29.900 in my country as we speak.

00:56:32.120 And they shut it down

00:56:33.460 and the minutes

00:56:34.080 for that meeting were lost.

00:56:35.760 That's a precise example

00:56:36.640 of what I'm talking about, right?

00:56:37.620 They're so precise,

00:56:38.620 they're active,

00:56:39.160 they follow the letter of the law

00:56:40.120 on so many things,

00:56:41.220 can't say that in court,

00:56:42.260 but they'll just,

00:56:44.160 oh, lose minutes

00:56:45.200 and forget to shut,

00:56:47.200 explain why they shut that down.

00:56:48.620 You can't request

00:56:49.640 those minutes of that meeting.

00:56:50.800 You can't even get

00:56:51.420 a whistleblower to come forward.

00:56:52.720 No one's got the minerals

00:56:53.500 from that meeting

00:56:54.220 to come up and own up

00:56:55.140 about what happened.

00:56:56.400 No one's got the bollocks

00:56:57.120 who was in that meeting

00:56:57.880 to say 20 years on,

00:56:59.200 oh yeah,

00:56:59.660 I was part of a group

00:57:00.380 that shut down

00:57:00.980 an investigation

00:57:02.160 into child abuse.

00:57:04.220 I would love them

00:57:05.300 to do it anonymously.

00:57:06.520 I'd protect them,

00:57:07.120 I'd protect every source.

00:57:08.040 I would love them

00:57:08.820 to come forward

00:57:09.280 and explain why that happened.

00:57:11.040 I don't mind

00:57:11.420 if they dob in someone else.

00:57:13.120 Someone's got to come forward

00:57:13.920 and explain

00:57:14.280 why they shut down

00:57:14.920 that meeting.

00:57:15.600 Don't care who it is.

00:57:17.100 Gold level

00:57:17.500 would have been

00:57:18.180 some serious pensions

00:57:19.180 in that room.

00:57:20.440 All those pensions

00:57:20.920 were protected

00:57:21.360 because they did nothing.

00:57:22.240 There are so many

00:57:23.060 other examples like that

00:57:23.920 around the country, right?

00:57:25.560 Rotherham,

00:57:25.920 files went missing,

00:57:27.040 laptops were stolen,

00:57:27.860 rooms were broken into.

00:57:29.840 Telford,

00:57:30.600 the child abuse

00:57:32.660 investigation team

00:57:33.380 was minimised

00:57:34.200 to such a level

00:57:34.700 it might as well

00:57:35.060 not have existed.

00:57:36.940 No one's ever been

00:57:37.460 held accountable for that.

00:57:38.920 None of these investigations

00:57:39.840 could compel witnesses.

00:57:42.880 And so,

00:57:43.240 as this story

00:57:44.260 has come back,

00:57:44.960 one of the reasons

00:57:45.420 it did so,

00:57:47.320 Elon Musk

00:57:47.760 started reading about it.

00:57:49.900 He's got a great link

00:57:50.740 to this country.

00:57:51.460 He also cares about people.

00:57:52.920 He's quite as well

00:57:54.580 within his rights

00:57:55.160 to speak up

00:57:55.820 about this issue.

00:57:56.640 Some people say

00:57:57.100 he shouldn't be talking

00:57:57.600 about it.

00:57:58.940 I've got a few words

00:58:00.140 for those people.

00:58:00.940 But,

00:58:02.820 no,

00:58:03.020 he has.

00:58:03.840 And then,

00:58:05.420 I had a story

00:58:06.700 ready to go,

00:58:07.380 right?

00:58:09.380 Which I wasn't

00:58:10.040 going to do

00:58:10.520 at the time.

00:58:11.640 Which was that

00:58:12.380 Oldham Council,

00:58:13.420 which is a council

00:58:13.920 in Greater Manchester,

00:58:14.800 had

00:58:15.180 put forward

00:58:17.340 a request

00:58:17.720 to the government

00:58:18.160 for a

00:58:19.320 government-led

00:58:20.460 investigation

00:58:21.200 into the grooming

00:58:21.980 gangs in the town.

00:58:22.920 So,

00:58:23.480 in 2022,

00:58:24.360 they were part

00:58:24.740 of the Andy Burnham

00:58:25.460 review I mentioned,

00:58:26.360 which also did

00:58:26.900 Rochdale's

00:58:27.700 Assurance Review,

00:58:28.660 they called it.

00:58:29.880 Survivors in the town,

00:58:31.140 families,

00:58:31.720 they all said

00:58:32.140 it was a cover-up.

00:58:33.540 Nobody was compelled

00:58:34.860 to give evidence.

00:58:36.640 The terms of reference,

00:58:37.700 they looked at

00:58:38.080 2011 to 2014.

00:58:39.480 I know survivors

00:58:40.100 from 2001.

00:58:42.300 I've met more

00:58:43.380 even in the last few months.

00:58:45.680 So,

00:58:46.140 it was a total

00:58:46.440 stitch-up,

00:58:46.980 that review.

00:58:47.480 Did nothing.

00:58:47.980 Nobody held accountable.

00:58:49.360 The two men who ran it,

00:58:51.240 Darian Malcolm,

00:58:52.100 Ridgway and Newsome,

00:58:53.720 it's not their fault.

00:58:56.100 Total legends.

00:58:56.820 They did a great job

00:58:57.380 with what they had,

00:58:57.900 but they just weren't

00:58:58.560 allowed to do anything.

00:58:59.440 I revealed last year

00:59:00.260 that they had resigned

00:59:01.180 from Andy Burnham's

00:59:02.660 investigation team

00:59:03.560 because they were

00:59:04.560 denied access

00:59:05.960 to investigations

00:59:08.380 from Greater Manchester

00:59:09.160 Police,

00:59:09.520 and they said that

00:59:10.020 legal powers

00:59:10.940 were coming on them,

00:59:11.820 stopping them

00:59:12.300 talking to survivors.

00:59:13.200 I didn't exactly

00:59:15.000 hide that story.

00:59:15.760 I, in caps,

00:59:16.920 revealed,

00:59:17.580 two men resigned.

00:59:18.260 Nobody cared.

00:59:19.060 We did it on GB News

00:59:20.020 for a few days

00:59:20.560 and then nobody

00:59:21.120 cottoned onto this.

00:59:22.080 I should have

00:59:22.840 led newspapers.

00:59:24.100 Two men are resigning

00:59:24.840 from a child abuse

00:59:25.480 investigation because

00:59:26.260 the police are blocking them.

00:59:27.760 Nobody cared.

00:59:28.500 No alarm bells went off.

00:59:29.880 A lot of politicians

00:59:30.420 are talking about it now,

00:59:31.200 but when I raised it

00:59:31.780 at the time

00:59:32.120 and I showed them,

00:59:32.920 whatever.

00:59:34.740 So, Oldham,

00:59:35.340 having had this

00:59:36.240 stitch-up investigation,

00:59:37.220 they wanted the government

00:59:37.900 to lead in,

00:59:38.420 compel investigations,

00:59:39.940 proper investigations,

00:59:41.280 proper statutory

00:59:42.420 legal powers,

00:59:43.980 turned down by

00:59:44.800 Jess Phillips,

00:59:45.460 the safeguarding minister.

00:59:46.380 Turned it down in October.

00:59:48.440 Sent off an FOI

00:59:49.260 asking for the letter,

00:59:50.220 Freedom of Information

00:59:50.820 request,

00:59:51.260 is what we call it.

00:59:52.000 So, the government

00:59:52.480 has to give you information.

00:59:54.040 They gave me this information.

00:59:55.080 I got it all signed off,

00:59:56.260 got a statement

00:59:56.680 from the Home Office,

00:59:57.640 which is our

00:59:58.100 big department,

01:00:00.180 by early December,

01:00:01.680 but I didn't run it.

01:00:02.880 I didn't run the story

01:00:03.600 because it was

01:00:05.540 like Christmas time

01:00:06.240 and I didn't think

01:00:07.920 it would do very well

01:00:08.540 and it wasn't the right

01:00:09.760 time to do it.

01:00:11.020 Parliament was in recess,

01:00:11.960 no politicians were around,

01:00:13.200 it wouldn't have an effect.

01:00:14.420 I also chose not to run it

01:00:15.680 because I knew

01:00:16.080 nobody else was on this.

01:00:17.900 There's no other

01:00:18.720 journalists looking

01:00:19.420 at that area.

01:00:20.480 So, everyone loves

01:00:22.120 to scoop in journalism,

01:00:23.620 everyone likes to be first

01:00:24.640 and once you've got one,

01:00:26.240 you're keen to

01:00:27.920 disseminate urgently

01:00:28.780 because you want to have

01:00:29.680 that story out there.

01:00:31.180 I felt no such pressure.

01:00:33.240 I was sitting on

01:00:33.680 something pretty big

01:00:34.280 and I was

01:00:34.940 happy as Larry

01:00:36.200 because I knew

01:00:36.560 there was no one else

01:00:37.140 knocking on the door

01:00:38.180 for it.

01:00:39.500 So, when Elon

01:00:39.820 started tweeting about it,

01:00:41.020 it was New Year's Day,

01:00:42.460 I was away,

01:00:43.660 I was out of town,

01:00:44.920 having a holiday actually,

01:00:46.320 I thought,

01:00:46.720 I've got to do it now,

01:00:47.400 I've got to put that

01:00:48.000 story out now.

01:00:49.900 Put it out

01:00:50.460 and the next day,

01:00:51.800 Elon shared it,

01:00:53.080 thank you very much,

01:00:53.900 and the next day,

01:00:55.740 Kimmy Bade

01:00:56.100 not called for a

01:00:56.700 national inquiry,

01:00:57.280 the leader of the

01:00:57.780 Conservatives.

01:00:59.660 She could have called

01:01:00.380 for it a year before,

01:01:02.380 but she chose to call it

01:01:03.100 that day,

01:01:03.640 whatever.

01:01:04.660 Sometimes politicians

01:01:05.440 need a media moment

01:01:06.380 to justify their

01:01:07.200 interventions.

01:01:08.180 This was it for her.

01:01:09.600 Since then,

01:01:10.900 that first week actually,

01:01:12.240 a lot of people said,

01:01:13.560 we don't need this

01:01:14.600 because we've already

01:01:15.960 had these inquiries

01:01:16.540 and also this is a problem

01:01:17.600 of the past,

01:01:18.300 this has all been done.

01:01:19.280 Rotherham,

01:01:19.700 that's just Rotherham,

01:01:20.280 2014.

01:01:20.560 2014.

01:01:21.960 And in fairness,

01:01:23.040 there were also people

01:01:23.640 like me,

01:01:23.960 and I'm glad you

01:01:24.540 corrected me

01:01:25.080 because I posted

01:01:25.660 something about this

01:01:26.440 and you were like,

01:01:27.060 actually,

01:01:27.240 a lot of people

01:01:29.180 are very sceptical

01:01:31.200 of the power of

01:01:32.200 inquiries to do anything.

01:01:33.660 And part of the reason

01:01:34.560 is you're a lot younger

01:01:35.340 than us.

01:01:35.720 If you lived through

01:01:36.380 the Iraq war,

01:01:37.360 and then there was

01:01:38.200 about 57 different

01:01:39.660 inquiries which all

01:01:40.580 found miraculously that

01:01:42.000 no one did anything

01:01:42.840 wrong and everything

01:01:43.480 was wonderful.

01:01:44.420 There's no shortage

01:01:45.120 of stitch-up inquiries

01:01:45.900 in this country,

01:01:47.060 but some of them work.

01:01:48.020 The infected blood

01:01:48.660 scandal,

01:01:48.960 people are happy

01:01:50.820 about that.

01:01:51.780 Victims of that

01:01:52.360 are happy about it.

01:01:53.180 But yeah,

01:01:53.460 when it comes to

01:01:54.120 big pressure stuff,

01:01:55.300 a lot of the times

01:01:55.940 they look the other way.

01:01:57.360 The problem with this

01:01:58.440 and the reason why

01:01:59.020 a national inquiry

01:01:59.520 would be so good

01:02:00.300 and so effective,

01:02:01.160 I think,

01:02:01.940 is because the guilty

01:02:03.000 men and women,

01:02:04.380 the evidence against

01:02:05.220 them would come out

01:02:05.760 so effectively

01:02:06.420 and they'd have to

01:02:07.180 come forward.

01:02:08.140 Even the most

01:02:09.340 immense Stalin-style

01:02:12.400 cover-up merchant

01:02:13.340 couldn't possibly

01:02:14.080 get rid of this one. 0.76

01:02:15.200 But in that week

01:02:16.080 after,

01:02:16.460 people kept saying,

01:02:17.620 oh,

01:02:17.840 it's all a thing

01:02:18.160 of the past.

01:02:19.700 You know,

01:02:20.220 after I released

01:02:21.100 that documentary

01:02:21.620 in 2023,

01:02:24.420 Suella Braverman,

01:02:25.080 the much hated

01:02:26.640 Home Secretary

01:02:27.240 at the time,

01:02:27.920 completely derided

01:02:28.760 by the liberal media,

01:02:30.740 she launched

01:02:31.460 a grooming gangs

01:02:32.300 task force,

01:02:33.380 which if you watch

01:02:33.800 the documentary,

01:02:34.180 one of the things

01:02:34.460 we call for at the end,

01:02:35.180 we call for

01:02:35.700 National Crime Agency,

01:02:38.140 Britain's FBI,

01:02:39.000 NCA-led investigations

01:02:41.320 into every part

01:02:42.280 of the country

01:02:42.660 where this is going on.

01:02:43.340 So they launched

01:02:43.740 this task force.

01:02:44.620 In its first year,

01:02:46.200 2023 to 2024,

01:02:47.580 it made over 550

01:02:49.600 arrests and protected

01:02:50.880 4,000 victims.

01:02:53.540 When they made that

01:02:54.220 announcement last year,

01:02:56.260 I got to interview

01:02:57.120 the safeguarding minister,

01:02:58.000 as did one other

01:02:58.540 journalist,

01:02:58.900 but there were no

01:02:59.220 other requests.

01:03:01.020 They just revealed

01:03:01.700 that there are thousands

01:03:02.760 of victims still being

01:03:03.660 identified in one year

01:03:04.720 from a newly

01:03:05.540 established force,

01:03:06.920 which is still up

01:03:08.020 and running, 0.69

01:03:08.700 working out its powers,

01:03:09.640 working out how

01:03:10.040 it can do stuff.

01:03:10.600 500 arrests,

01:03:12.220 new ongoing issues.

01:03:13.940 Some of them,

01:03:14.280 I imagine,

01:03:14.620 will be non-recent,

01:03:15.820 but they've not

01:03:17.180 shared the data,

01:03:17.860 funny enough.

01:03:18.460 But what they've

01:03:19.700 demonstrated is an

01:03:20.940 ongoing problem.

01:03:21.580 Alarm bells should 0.85

01:03:22.280 have been popping

01:03:22.840 off everywhere,

01:03:23.880 but they weren't.

01:03:24.440 People just sort of

01:03:25.080 went back,

01:03:25.520 another grooming gang

01:03:26.200 story,

01:03:26.520 who really cares?

01:03:27.360 It's that difficult

01:03:28.160 issue that we don't

01:03:28.760 want to get into.

01:03:29.820 So it moved on.

01:03:31.500 That was the last

01:03:32.240 big media moment on it

01:03:33.240 and it wasn't even

01:03:33.700 that much of a moment.

01:03:34.400 So just resharing

01:03:36.980 that fact that in one

01:03:39.700 year you made all

01:03:40.480 those arrests and you

01:03:41.800 protected all those

01:03:42.540 victims is so important

01:03:44.020 to completely run over

01:03:48.040 this myth that this is

01:03:48.920 a thing of the past.

01:03:49.700 This is some northern

01:03:50.820 towns in the 2000s.

01:03:52.700 No, this is here and

01:03:53.320 now.

01:03:53.660 This is across the

01:03:54.760 country everywhere now.

01:03:57.040 And Charlie,

01:03:57.740 Yvette Cooper came out

01:03:58.860 and said that there was

01:03:59.680 going to be a national

01:04:00.800 inquiry after,

01:04:02.460 because let's be fair,

01:04:04.000 because of the great

01:04:04.680 work done by yourselves

01:04:05.540 and also pressure done

01:04:06.500 by a lot of other

01:04:07.860 activists and journalists.

01:04:10.360 Are you optimistic

01:04:11.460 that we're going to

01:04:12.020 finally see justice done?

01:04:13.520 I've made two minds

01:04:13.980 about this.

01:04:14.780 So I think,

01:04:16.280 first and foremost,

01:04:16.880 it's great that there's

01:04:17.400 any government action

01:04:18.520 at all on this.

01:04:20.680 But let's not forget,

01:04:21.700 I mean,

01:04:21.800 a week or so before

01:04:23.480 the Home Secretary

01:04:24.360 of Yvette Cooper

01:04:24.820 made that announcement,

01:04:25.860 the Prime Minister was

01:04:26.820 at a hospital in Surrey

01:04:28.320 doing a press conference

01:04:30.600 about the NHS.

01:04:31.860 All the questions

01:04:32.480 after a while were

01:04:32.900 about grooming gangs

01:04:33.640 and he said he was

01:04:35.020 concerned that politicians

01:04:36.040 were jumping on a bandwagon

01:04:37.880 amid far-right poison.

01:04:41.180 Was he being cynical?

01:04:42.260 Do you know what?

01:04:42.560 I think he actually

01:04:43.120 believes that.

01:04:43.600 I think he actually

01:04:44.080 thinks it is a far-right

01:04:45.120 issue to care about this.

01:04:46.320 But this is also worth

01:04:47.360 pointing out as well,

01:04:48.440 that he was head of

01:04:49.240 prosecutions in 2011

01:04:51.180 and he actually said

01:04:53.240 that this was a cultural issue.

01:04:56.180 He said we've let down

01:04:57.000 generations of girls.

01:04:58.320 But he was in the DPP

01:05:00.340 for a bit while

01:05:01.660 before 2011

01:05:02.480 and the CPS,

01:05:05.080 the prosecution service

01:05:06.080 in the country,

01:05:06.760 has failed

01:05:07.420 in several areas.

01:05:08.660 Recently,

01:05:09.080 excellent work from Channel 4

01:05:10.220 in Barrow in Cumbria

01:05:11.180 has shown that the CPS

01:05:12.600 recommended all

01:05:14.040 neglected charges

01:05:15.300 of abuse victims

01:05:16.080 in the area.

01:05:16.660 There are big questions

01:05:17.380 to answer for prosecutors.

01:05:18.660 Perhaps Keir Starmer

01:05:19.300 doesn't want an investigation

01:05:20.280 in part because

01:05:21.280 he'd be called

01:05:22.880 to give evidence.

01:05:24.200 Why not?

01:05:24.840 DPP,

01:05:25.620 Director of Prosecutions

01:05:26.680 during that period.

01:05:28.180 I'm sure he'd have to

01:05:28.860 give some evidence about it.

01:05:30.280 It probably wouldn't be

01:05:30.780 a great time for him.

01:05:32.220 It's not to say

01:05:32.700 he's been involved

01:05:33.260 in any wrongdoing,

01:05:34.380 but he'd still have

01:05:34.860 to speak about it.

01:05:35.700 He had a significant role

01:05:36.640 when this issue

01:05:37.340 was at its height.

01:05:37.980 So he made that intervention

01:05:39.260 about the far-right

01:05:40.020 a week before.

01:05:43.820 You know what?

01:05:44.340 I was standing in Tameside

01:05:45.620 in Greater Manchester,

01:05:46.660 an area where there's

01:05:47.040 never been an investigation,

01:05:48.060 but it's right below

01:05:48.600 Oldham and Rochdale.

01:05:49.580 And again,

01:05:49.880 there's no force field there.

01:05:51.120 I know girls were 1.00

01:05:51.920 trafficked into that area

01:05:52.960 and abuse as well.

01:05:53.740 And in fact,

01:05:54.020 I met with a father

01:05:56.000 of a victim

01:05:56.440 that afternoon

01:05:57.440 very soon after

01:05:58.800 Sakhir gave that intervention.

01:06:01.460 And I was happy

01:06:02.300 he said far-right

01:06:03.560 because I know

01:06:04.580 how the media works

01:06:05.300 in this country, right?

01:06:06.300 I work in it.

01:06:07.140 I knew that gave the story

01:06:08.300 five more days.

01:06:09.760 I was really worried

01:06:10.940 that because of the Elon thing,

01:06:12.160 everyone would move away

01:06:13.020 from the Screaming Langs moment

01:06:14.180 that I got back

01:06:16.440 from my holiday

01:06:16.800 pretty much instantly.

01:06:17.660 I went straight back

01:06:18.400 to going around the country,

01:06:20.020 getting back in touch

01:06:21.000 with survivors and families

01:06:22.100 I met before.

01:06:22.600 I was really nervous

01:06:23.700 that it was just going to be

01:06:24.680 GB News talking about it

01:06:25.840 and no one else

01:06:26.500 would be on it.

01:06:27.560 But as soon as

01:06:28.520 Sakhir Starmer said

01:06:29.500 far-right,

01:06:31.160 beaming.

01:06:31.680 I was absolutely beaming.

01:06:33.400 Clearly,

01:06:33.780 it's an offensive thing

01:06:35.040 to have done,

01:06:35.840 to have disparaged

01:06:36.740 so many people

01:06:37.180 who care about this far-right.

01:06:38.720 But for me,

01:06:39.380 I was like,

01:06:39.680 oh,

01:06:40.420 he's done it.

01:06:41.060 He's given the newspapers

01:06:42.100 a reason to get stuck in

01:06:44.180 and lo and behold,

01:06:45.700 the next day,

01:06:46.260 the front page of the Daily Mail

01:06:47.280 was going into him.

01:06:48.640 The Telegraph did the same.

01:06:49.700 Loads of other papers

01:06:50.320 were getting stuck in

01:06:51.500 on this issue.

01:06:52.720 And the rhetoric

01:06:53.440 continued for a week

01:06:54.440 because it gave politicians

01:06:55.780 a bit of ammunition.

01:06:56.580 It kept the story alive.

01:06:58.560 It's a shame,

01:06:59.660 of course,

01:07:00.100 that so much of the focus

01:07:01.120 was on Elon Musk

01:07:03.000 and what Kemi and Keir

01:07:05.720 said in Parliament

01:07:06.460 and not what I think

01:07:07.980 it should have been

01:07:08.360 on the survivors

01:07:08.900 and their stories

01:07:09.540 and the appalling

01:07:10.860 travesties that have

01:07:11.640 come to light.

01:07:12.740 I was disturbed

01:07:13.720 by the number of newspapers

01:07:14.800 who got in touch with me

01:07:15.840 and said,

01:07:16.820 oh,

01:07:16.940 can you introduce us

01:07:17.660 to some survivors?

01:07:18.700 Da, da, da, da, da.

01:07:19.440 I was like,

01:07:19.780 well,

01:07:20.840 you should have been

01:07:21.260 on this for years.

01:07:22.040 Have you not built

01:07:22.480 those contacts?

01:07:23.100 This is a national travesty.

01:07:24.240 Have you not maintained

01:07:25.320 those links?

01:07:26.280 Have you lost them?

01:07:27.600 Some of them did a good job.

01:07:29.160 Some of them had a few people

01:07:30.080 they'd spoken to over the years.

01:07:31.260 A lot of journalists

01:07:31.600 had those connections,

01:07:32.040 but a lot of them

01:07:32.400 had let it fall away.

01:07:33.460 So Yvette Cooper,

01:07:34.020 let's go back to that.

01:07:34.840 Sorry,

01:07:35.020 I got sidetracked.

01:07:37.580 Yvette Cooper

01:07:38.020 did make that intervention

01:07:39.120 on the 16th or 17th

01:07:42.100 in the House of Commons.

01:07:42.960 She said,

01:07:43.820 among several demands,

01:07:44.940 there would be

01:07:45.460 five locally-led inquiries.

01:07:49.440 One of them will be Oldham,

01:07:50.920 which is the area

01:07:51.580 that made that request.

01:07:53.980 It won't be government-led.

01:07:55.140 It won't be statutory.

01:07:56.180 There won't be witnesses

01:07:57.280 being compelled.

01:07:58.400 It'll be in the same model

01:07:59.180 as Telford,

01:08:00.020 which the government thinks

01:08:00.840 was a very effective method.

01:08:02.640 They say that survivors there

01:08:03.560 think it was very effective.

01:08:04.660 It's true.

01:08:05.340 They found lots of problems

01:08:06.240 but tell me,

01:08:08.560 Miss Cooper,

01:08:09.320 who was sacked in Telford?

01:08:10.620 Who was prosecuted

01:08:11.500 on the back of the report?

01:08:13.020 Zero people.

01:08:13.660 Nobody.

01:08:14.100 Never.

01:08:15.520 That's not an effective model,

01:08:16.660 is it?

01:08:17.080 So what do we need, Charlie?

01:08:18.840 What are you calling for?

01:08:20.160 What should happen here?

01:08:21.740 Well, I'm a reporter.

01:08:22.380 I can't call for anything.

01:08:23.320 Sure you can.

01:08:24.060 Let's see.

01:08:24.880 What needs to happen?

01:08:25.660 I'll go through the rest

01:08:26.360 of what Yvette Cooper said

01:08:27.420 because it's important

01:08:28.380 to get to the bottom

01:08:29.280 of what the government's doing now.

01:08:30.960 They've got that

01:08:31.660 one in all of them

01:08:33.340 before others.

01:08:34.420 Where would they be?

01:08:34.880 Will this be like Ixer? 1.00

01:08:37.060 Will they choose six areas

01:08:38.460 that don't matter?

01:08:39.400 Will they go back to Warwickshire?

01:08:41.300 Will they go to Bradford?

01:08:42.400 Will they go to Huddersfield?

01:08:43.500 Will they go to areas

01:08:44.200 that I know

01:08:44.900 would dwarf Rotherham?

01:08:47.780 Or...

01:08:48.260 So what areas are those?

01:08:49.660 Bradford?

01:08:51.420 Bradford, Huddersfield,

01:08:53.140 Birmingham,

01:08:53.540 the whole West Midlands

01:08:54.120 really, Wolverhampton

01:08:54.820 needs to be included

01:08:55.380 in that,

01:08:55.740 Solihull in the east as well.

01:08:56.960 Really important

01:08:57.540 they look around

01:08:57.980 the West Mids in general.

01:08:59.580 Nottingham,

01:09:01.000 East Midlands too.

01:09:02.560 We'd love to see

01:09:03.200 a Scotland-wide investigation

01:09:04.640 as well.

01:09:05.160 I think Glasgow

01:09:05.620 is really fascinating.

01:09:07.240 The abuse gangs there.

01:09:08.500 Newcastle needs

01:09:09.040 it's an independent investigation.

01:09:10.720 Hell,

01:09:10.840 I could list 50 different

01:09:11.680 towns and cities

01:09:12.120 I can keep going.

01:09:13.020 We go to Oxford,

01:09:14.260 Banbury,

01:09:15.080 Aylesbury,

01:09:15.920 any parts of Buckinghamshire

01:09:16.920 really.

01:09:17.380 High Wycombe is really

01:09:18.000 important to go to.

01:09:18.880 Be good to go to Bristol.

01:09:19.840 I'd love it if they went

01:09:20.540 back to Telford

01:09:21.120 and did a proper

01:09:22.100 investigation there.

01:09:24.140 I'd be delighted

01:09:24.680 they went to Merseyside.

01:09:25.880 Be good if they could

01:09:26.620 look into those areas.

01:09:28.580 Fundamentally,

01:09:29.000 what's needed

01:09:29.280 is a national inquiry.

01:09:30.480 The entire nation

01:09:31.360 needs to be looked into

01:09:32.640 on a national level

01:09:33.580 compelling people.

01:09:35.080 That would be costly

01:09:35.780 and it would take time.

01:09:37.020 But do you know

01:09:37.560 what's more costly

01:09:38.120 and do you know

01:09:38.380 what takes more time?

01:09:39.380 Doing nothing

01:09:39.940 and letting people suffer.

01:09:41.380 They've also announced

01:09:42.260 part of this intervention

01:09:43.680 that the Home Secretary made

01:09:45.220 that there's going to be

01:09:46.680 a rapid three-month audit

01:09:48.000 being led by Dame Louise Casey,

01:09:50.100 the woman who,

01:09:50.940 in 2015,

01:09:52.600 looked into Rotherham

01:09:53.920 and said it was

01:09:54.460 a cover-up there.

01:09:55.640 So she's going to lead

01:09:56.560 an investigation of data

01:09:58.060 they've already got.

01:09:59.720 I think that's

01:10:00.780 a pre-written conclusion.

01:10:03.100 It's going to come back

01:10:03.700 and say,

01:10:04.180 we've got no data

01:10:05.580 because these forces

01:10:06.880 have messed up

01:10:07.880 catastrophically

01:10:08.720 and has been shown

01:10:09.400 time and time again.

01:10:10.320 They just don't collect

01:10:10.960 the data.

01:10:11.380 They'd rather not.

01:10:12.800 Hampshire, for example,

01:10:13.680 is the worst county

01:10:14.680 for collecting data.

01:10:15.900 Why is that?

01:10:16.500 It makes me nervous.

01:10:17.660 Why in Hampshire?

01:10:18.140 Which doesn't really

01:10:18.660 have a significant issue,

01:10:19.660 I think,

01:10:19.960 with this sort of abuse

01:10:20.680 as far as I can tell.

01:10:22.220 Why are they not

01:10:22.940 recording the ethnicity 0.92

01:10:24.440 of child sexual abuse

01:10:25.660 perpetrators?

01:10:26.700 Perhaps there's something

01:10:27.260 going on there

01:10:27.660 we don't know about.

01:10:28.760 It'd be great to have

01:10:29.240 an inquiry to work it out.

01:10:30.680 So I think she'll come back

01:10:33.240 and say we don't know

01:10:33.880 and we need further

01:10:34.400 investigation.

01:10:35.680 And I think the government

01:10:36.820 is now tiptoeing

01:10:37.740 towards an inquiry

01:10:38.760 that they can't call for

01:10:40.320 on the back of pressure

01:10:41.120 from the opposition,

01:10:43.060 Elon Musk and GB News.

01:10:44.420 They can't be seen

01:10:45.140 to give in to us,

01:10:46.000 especially after calling

01:10:46.740 us far right

01:10:47.360 seven days prior, right?

01:10:48.780 Doesn't necessarily

01:10:50.160 work politically.

01:10:51.280 I think they're possibly

01:10:52.680 creating their own

01:10:53.700 political capital

01:10:54.620 to make a decision

01:10:55.760 that was impossible before.

01:10:57.720 But there are people

01:10:58.800 in number 10

01:10:59.660 I've spoken to

01:11:00.280 who say that's not the case.

01:11:01.480 There's definitely not the case.

01:11:02.520 And they're not speaking

01:11:03.020 to me in their capacity

01:11:03.840 as this is going to get reported.

01:11:05.340 They're speaking to me

01:11:05.900 as just someone they know, right?

01:11:06.960 who are saying,

01:11:08.920 no, we think we've done enough

01:11:09.760 to push this issue down

01:11:11.100 and it's not going to come back

01:11:12.660 and that'll be it.

01:11:13.740 But, you know,

01:11:14.880 Sarah Champion stood up. 0.99

01:11:16.280 She's an MP for Rotherham,

01:11:17.620 Labour MP.

01:11:18.960 She said that there needed

01:11:20.180 to be a national inquiry.

01:11:21.160 She said there needs

01:11:21.820 to compel witnesses.

01:11:22.960 She also called for

01:11:23.680 what I think was really interesting,

01:11:25.180 a commission

01:11:26.000 on the motivation

01:11:27.540 behind the gangs.

01:11:29.160 She says,

01:11:29.440 we know about the abuse.

01:11:30.840 We don't really know

01:11:31.400 why it happens.

01:11:32.560 She is,

01:11:33.040 what she's doing that I think,

01:11:34.500 she's never spoken to me,

01:11:35.360 I've tried.

01:11:35.700 What I think she's doing there

01:11:37.620 is saying we need to work out

01:11:39.060 those ethnicity issues,

01:11:40.960 those cultural issues,

01:11:42.080 that clannishness,

01:11:42.980 the sexism,

01:11:43.860 those attitudes

01:11:44.620 that we've never really investigated.

01:11:46.200 That's what she's saying

01:11:47.160 because we don't know.

01:11:48.780 She's calling for,

01:11:49.520 she's calling for free speech

01:11:51.440 and investigation

01:11:52.140 and discussion

01:11:53.140 and proper inquiry

01:11:55.360 into that sort of crisis.

01:11:57.980 One of the reasons

01:11:58.620 why it's so important,

01:11:59.320 I think,

01:11:59.480 would be to dispel

01:11:59.980 all those myths

01:12:00.500 so we get to the truth of it.

01:12:01.420 But perhaps that might

01:12:02.700 come out of it.

01:12:03.540 Nobody else has backed up

01:12:04.560 her call for it.

01:12:05.660 One other Labour MP,

01:12:07.120 Dan Carden,

01:12:08.520 is a former Corbynite

01:12:09.400 but he's become a bit more

01:12:10.320 of a sort of

01:12:10.700 on the right of the party

01:12:11.560 under the blue Labour tradition,

01:12:13.540 Maurice Glasman,

01:12:14.140 all that stuff.

01:12:14.620 He's sort of moved a bit

01:12:16.460 and he's had a bit of a journey,

01:12:17.560 I think.

01:12:18.420 He came out quite boldly

01:12:20.560 before Sarah Champion did,

01:12:21.840 actually he was the first MP

01:12:22.600 to break ranks

01:12:23.200 and he said,

01:12:24.040 this is an atrocity

01:12:24.840 which we need to fix

01:12:25.780 and we should use

01:12:26.280 all powers of the state,

01:12:27.700 including a national inquiry,

01:12:28.920 to get to the bottom of it.

01:12:29.680 He's right,

01:12:30.660 it is an atrocity.

01:12:32.720 And I've got rid

01:12:33.140 of the report a bit now,

01:12:33.960 I'll be honest,

01:12:34.480 I think this is a story

01:12:35.280 I care about so much,

01:12:36.420 it's clear what I want

01:12:37.660 and that is

01:12:38.080 guilty men and women 0.97

01:12:39.320 held to account,

01:12:40.420 perpetrators properly dealt with

01:12:41.660 and for us as a society

01:12:42.840 to confront

01:12:44.080 what's really happening here,

01:12:45.480 that requires

01:12:46.400 a national inquiry

01:12:47.480 which takes into account

01:12:48.580 that the motivations element

01:12:51.200 which takes into account

01:12:52.640 corruption,

01:12:53.720 collusion,

01:12:54.620 which gets people

01:12:56.100 in front of

01:12:57.440 barristers and a judge

01:12:59.120 I'd preferably want

01:13:00.700 someone not from

01:13:01.260 this country,

01:13:02.060 by the way,

01:13:02.320 a foreign judge

01:13:02.940 to come in and do it

01:13:03.640 who aren't tainted by...

01:13:04.880 That's so damning, Charlie.

01:13:06.220 I would like that.

01:13:06.880 I would like...

01:13:07.740 A lot of people

01:13:08.540 will agree with you.

01:13:09.160 I would hate to have

01:13:11.200 one of these KCs

01:13:12.260 that I've seen

01:13:13.100 or QCs or whatever

01:13:13.920 over the years

01:13:15.220 who kind of

01:13:16.640 reduce their tone

01:13:17.700 in court

01:13:18.180 when they say,

01:13:19.140 when they make a reference

01:13:19.820 to the racialised element

01:13:20.720 of the abuse.

01:13:21.460 I would hate

01:13:22.100 for one of these like,

01:13:23.940 I'm a posh boy,

01:13:25.140 I was raised in Surrey,

01:13:26.060 I went to Winchester,

01:13:26.720 I went to the same school

01:13:27.340 as Rishi,

01:13:27.700 I've got a philosophy degree

01:13:28.880 from Edinburgh,

01:13:29.440 I understand

01:13:30.140 these people,

01:13:31.860 they are nervous

01:13:32.960 talking about this stuff

01:13:34.880 and you can hear it

01:13:35.440 in their voices,

01:13:35.960 they sort of quiver

01:13:36.480 when they have to make

01:13:37.740 the prosecution notes,

01:13:38.980 when they have to tell the truth,

01:13:39.800 when they have to make the case

01:13:40.720 for the prosecution.

01:13:41.900 I would hate

01:13:42.540 for one of those judges

01:13:43.720 or barristers

01:13:45.280 to be part of the game.

01:13:46.480 I want someone

01:13:47.100 to come,

01:13:48.480 maybe someone like,

01:13:49.640 you know,

01:13:50.680 English speaking

01:13:51.180 and common law

01:13:51.700 like an Aussie judge

01:13:52.380 to come over

01:13:52.980 who could air

01:13:55.000 our dirty laundry

01:13:56.000 in public

01:13:56.500 to really expose

01:13:57.380 what's going on here

01:13:58.260 to show it

01:13:59.160 for what it is

01:13:59.720 without being

01:14:00.800 wrapped up

01:14:01.940 in the cultural sensitivities

01:14:03.520 and the

01:14:04.500 conscience of cover-up

01:14:06.740 which I think

01:14:07.120 really does actually

01:14:07.840 impact all classes

01:14:09.100 in this country

01:14:09.600 but particularly lawyers

01:14:10.680 who I think

01:14:11.100 are very shy people

01:14:11.920 who don't want to go back

01:14:12.840 to their friends

01:14:14.020 and family

01:14:14.520 in whatever cosy part

01:14:15.740 of the country

01:14:16.120 they live in

01:14:16.540 and say,

01:14:17.440 I had that terrible 1.00

01:14:18.300 Pakistani rape gang 0.99

01:14:19.700 business today 0.98

01:14:20.340 couldn't really get into it

01:14:21.520 felt a bit shy

01:14:22.340 don't want to upset

01:14:23.200 my friends

01:14:23.720 I think that's a problem

01:14:24.960 I do think we need

01:14:26.060 a foreign judge

01:14:26.580 to lead on this

01:14:27.180 But what you're actually

01:14:28.280 saying is that

01:14:28.880 you've got no faith

01:14:29.880 in the system

01:14:30.480 whatsoever

01:14:30.840 to bring justice

01:14:31.820 for these

01:14:32.780 poor girls and boys

01:14:35.020 I think it's impossible

01:14:36.320 to have faith

01:14:37.020 in the state

01:14:38.060 after looking at this problem

01:14:39.320 the state has failed

01:14:41.040 so severely

01:14:42.400 it is like

01:14:43.080 there is no

01:14:45.840 greater example

01:14:46.700 of

01:14:47.380 the lethal mix

01:14:49.820 of

01:14:50.140 active incompetence

01:14:51.860 and malice

01:14:52.560 to

01:14:53.560 prioritise

01:14:54.760 a false vision

01:14:55.760 of the country

01:14:56.320 over justice

01:14:57.760 Absolutely

01:14:59.160 It's the most

01:15:01.060 damning story

01:15:02.120 It drives a stake 1.00

01:15:03.000 right through the heart

01:15:04.160 of the Liberal project

01:15:05.660 It's not a motivation

01:15:07.020 for me to get into it

01:15:07.900 I didn't really have

01:15:08.740 any politics

01:15:09.400 when I started

01:15:10.420 looking at this

01:15:10.840 I was an 18 year old

01:15:11.540 pretty apolitical actually

01:15:12.460 when I first

01:15:13.240 was like ripped

01:15:14.680 as I said

01:15:15.240 from that

01:15:15.740 serenity

01:15:16.700 and that comfort

01:15:17.500 of England

01:15:18.200 that I knew before

01:15:18.880 didn't really have

01:15:19.740 any political views

01:15:20.480 I've learnt about

01:15:23.320 my country

01:15:24.040 a lot

01:15:24.640 through this issue

01:15:25.780 because of

01:15:26.560 what it shows

01:15:27.380 our priorities to be

01:15:28.480 what it shows

01:15:29.540 the state to be

01:15:30.500 and

01:15:31.280 fundamentally

01:15:33.060 the state thinks

01:15:34.200 you are an extremist

01:15:35.140 if you think

01:15:35.860 the things I do

01:15:36.580 about this

01:15:37.040 A leaked report

01:15:37.680 confirmed that

01:15:38.440 just recently

01:15:38.920 that a home office

01:15:40.380 department

01:15:40.840 RICU

01:15:41.360 which is the

01:15:42.320 research and

01:15:42.840 communications unit

01:15:43.660 they think

01:15:44.680 that caring

01:15:45.600 about alleged

01:15:46.660 grooming gangs

01:15:47.180 their language

01:15:47.600 not mine

01:15:47.920 is an example

01:15:49.080 of far right

01:15:49.920 extremism

01:15:50.340 right wing

01:15:50.660 extremism

01:15:51.120 but it's not

01:15:52.520 it's a problem

01:15:53.040 and it's real

01:15:53.560 it's happening

01:15:54.460 now

01:15:54.800 4,000 victims

01:15:56.040 500 arrests

01:15:57.240 one year

01:15:58.080 so the state

01:15:59.780 thinks that

01:16:00.640 if you care

01:16:01.680 about innocent

01:16:03.160 boys and girls 0.93

01:16:04.240 being raped 1.00

01:16:05.100 by 1.00

01:16:06.620 Pakistani 1.00

01:16:07.720 rape gangs 1.00

01:16:08.800 that makes you

01:16:10.220 far right

01:16:10.980 and a racist

01:16:11.580 yeah absolutely 1.00

01:16:12.500 how disgusting

01:16:13.800 is that 0.63

01:16:14.360 it's revolting

01:16:15.060 but it's

01:16:15.800 achievable

01:16:16.340 insofar as

01:16:17.300 the only voices

01:16:18.200 who've wanted

01:16:18.860 to talk about

01:16:19.240 this for so long

01:16:19.760 have been

01:16:20.320 right wing

01:16:21.220 or extreme

01:16:22.100 right wing

01:16:22.540 or whatever

01:16:22.900 you want to

01:16:23.200 call it

01:16:23.840 you know

01:16:26.040 a name we've

01:16:26.420 not mentioned yet

01:16:27.040 and I often

01:16:27.460 get criticised

01:16:28.000 for not mentioning

01:16:28.420 his name

01:16:28.780 Tommy Robinson

01:16:29.680 he cares a lot

01:16:32.920 about this issue

01:16:33.520 he has spoken

01:16:34.200 about it a lot

01:16:34.840 now I don't think

01:16:37.060 he's a good example

01:16:37.820 of someone

01:16:38.300 to get things

01:16:39.480 done on this issue

01:16:40.080 because he nearly

01:16:40.520 collapsed a set

01:16:41.300 of trials

01:16:41.760 in Huddersfield

01:16:42.400 in 2018

01:16:43.420 he was very

01:16:44.180 critical

01:16:44.660 he was very much

01:16:46.040 criticised for that

01:16:46.760 because he

01:16:47.420 filmed some defendants

01:16:48.800 as they were

01:16:49.080 leaving court

01:16:49.600 as I said before

01:16:50.540 a lot of trials

01:16:51.040 are linked

01:16:51.360 you can't report

01:16:52.380 on one

01:16:52.840 until the other

01:16:53.620 is done

01:16:54.000 because of

01:16:55.020 contempt of

01:16:55.520 court in this

01:16:55.880 country

01:16:56.120 if you're

01:16:57.820 a journalist

01:16:58.100 you know

01:16:58.320 about that

01:16:58.740 Tony Robinson

01:16:59.400 isn't a journalist

01:16:59.920 he's more of an

01:17:00.700 activist

01:17:00.940 and so he didn't

01:17:01.560 know about this

01:17:02.080 perhaps

01:17:02.440 that was his defence

01:17:03.080 but he's

01:17:05.000 he's certainly

01:17:05.700 almost collapsed

01:17:06.700 more trials

01:17:07.280 than he's instigated

01:17:08.160 okay

01:17:08.420 so

01:17:08.860 also like you were

01:17:10.740 saying about

01:17:11.120 the Islam thing 0.98

01:17:11.800 I think he ties it

01:17:12.580 more into an

01:17:13.120 anti-Islam agenda

01:17:14.160 than a proper

01:17:15.280 looking into this

01:17:16.320 approach

01:17:16.800 I think too many

01:17:17.740 people do that

01:17:18.260 they latch onto this

01:17:18.980 because they care

01:17:19.400 about Islam

01:17:19.820 more than they

01:17:20.360 care about

01:17:20.940 what's really

01:17:21.860 going on

01:17:22.800 the uglier

01:17:23.660 truth

01:17:23.900 is actually

01:17:24.200 so much

01:17:24.780 worse

01:17:25.180 than this

01:17:25.520 being

01:17:25.760 a religious

01:17:26.500 thing

01:17:26.780 in a way

01:17:27.320 I wish

01:17:27.600 it were

01:17:27.920 because

01:17:28.220 religion

01:17:28.940 is easier

01:17:29.420 to remove

01:17:29.940 than

01:17:30.160 clannishness

01:17:30.760 okay

01:17:31.240 I think

01:17:31.680 people

01:17:32.000 people

01:17:32.500 become

01:17:33.620 secularised

01:17:34.340 in Britain

01:17:34.640 over time

01:17:35.060 I don't

01:17:35.320 think that's

01:17:35.640 true of

01:17:35.980 this community

01:17:36.860 in this

01:17:37.620 way

01:17:37.880 what they're

01:17:38.560 going through

01:17:38.980 so it's

01:17:41.160 been very easy

01:17:41.720 to deride

01:17:42.260 people as

01:17:42.820 far right

01:17:43.500 or as

01:17:43.800 extreme

01:17:44.140 because the

01:17:44.500 only voices

01:17:45.040 doing it

01:17:45.480 have been

01:17:45.840 let's be

01:17:46.120 frank

01:17:46.400 on the

01:17:46.800 extreme

01:17:47.160 of society

01:17:47.740 the BNP 0.58

01:17:48.860 the racist 0.96

01:17:49.440 party 0.95

01:17:49.860 the BNP

01:17:50.440 was campaigning

01:17:51.040 on this

01:17:51.420 in the

01:17:52.080 2000s

01:17:53.080 right

01:17:53.300 they're the

01:17:53.900 only voices

01:17:54.320 going out

01:17:54.700 about it

01:17:55.080 the BNP

01:17:56.380 were right

01:17:56.880 in some

01:17:57.300 of these

01:17:57.480 towns

01:17:57.720 about this

01:17:58.220 issue

01:17:58.440 they were

01:17:58.760 right

01:17:59.100 they were

01:18:00.020 right

01:18:00.240 to care

01:18:00.520 about it

01:18:00.940 now their

01:18:01.540 intentions

01:18:02.080 may have

01:18:02.480 been wrong

01:18:02.820 Andrew

01:18:03.520 Norfolk

01:18:03.860 when he

01:18:04.100 said it

01:18:04.280 was a

01:18:04.520 far right

01:18:04.900 fantasy

01:18:05.260 he was

01:18:05.920 right

01:18:06.260 but that's

01:18:07.220 no excuse

01:18:08.080 for not doing

01:18:09.020 the right

01:18:09.220 thing and not

01:18:09.600 caring

01:18:09.780 that's no

01:18:10.400 excuse for

01:18:10.880 liberal

01:18:11.180 voices or

01:18:11.880 left-wing

01:18:12.200 voices

01:18:12.500 I don't

01:18:12.800 consider

01:18:13.120 myself

01:18:13.480 left-wing

01:18:14.060 or liberal

01:18:14.360 but it's

01:18:14.840 no excuse

01:18:15.240 for those

01:18:15.460 voices to

01:18:20.440 side-by-side

01:18:21.040 with those

01:18:21.540 they may

01:18:21.780 disagree with

01:18:22.340 more broadly

01:18:23.280 on political

01:18:23.680 issues

01:18:24.060 everyone

01:18:25.640 should care

01:18:26.720 about this

01:18:27.140 issue

01:18:27.460 and the

01:18:28.180 motivation

01:18:28.680 should be

01:18:29.680 to get

01:18:30.260 justice

01:18:30.600 and change

01:18:31.320 the cover-up

01:18:32.500 culture

01:18:32.920 that has

01:18:33.700 led to this

01:18:34.120 abuse

01:18:34.460 but because

01:18:35.500 only the

01:18:36.220 voices who

01:18:36.800 see political

01:18:37.380 opportunity

01:18:37.900 in it have

01:18:38.220 spoken about

01:18:38.720 it generally

01:18:39.480 that's been

01:18:40.420 a problem

01:18:40.780 we also

01:18:42.340 haven't heard

01:18:42.820 I think very

01:18:43.260 much from

01:18:43.540 the Pakistani

01:18:43.920 community

01:18:44.500 Kishwa

01:18:45.480 Faulkner

01:18:45.880 the chair

01:18:46.720 of the

01:18:47.240 ECHR

01:18:49.340 no

01:18:49.960 EHRC

01:18:51.340 Equality

01:18:52.180 and Human

01:18:52.540 Rights

01:18:52.720 Commission

01:18:53.020 EHRC

01:18:53.540 she wrote

01:18:55.580 in the

01:18:55.780 Times

01:18:56.020 recently

01:18:56.480 that

01:18:57.260 she is

01:18:59.560 British

01:18:59.780 Pakistani

01:19:00.140 herself

01:19:00.520 she's an 0.96

01:19:01.940 immigrant

01:19:02.120 she has

01:19:02.960 said that

01:19:03.260 it shames

01:19:04.180 her community

01:19:04.880 it shames 0.98

01:19:05.760 Pakistanis 0.80

01:19:06.380 that it's not

01:19:07.360 been confronted

01:19:08.020 properly

01:19:08.460 people haven't

01:19:09.620 come out

01:19:09.900 and said

01:19:10.140 this

01:19:10.440 in my

01:19:11.080 documentary

01:19:11.460 there's a

01:19:11.700 man called

01:19:11.980 Wazik Wazik

01:19:12.600 proud British

01:19:13.600 Pakistani

01:19:14.000 man

01:19:14.320 who does

01:19:15.940 say this

01:19:16.400 is an

01:19:16.620 issue of

01:19:16.900 clannishness

01:19:17.260 this is

01:19:17.460 something we've

01:19:17.840 got to get

01:19:18.040 to grips with

01:19:18.420 we've got to

01:19:18.820 get rid of

01:19:19.080 this

01:19:19.960 what happens

01:19:21.140 to those

01:19:21.400 the voices

01:19:21.760 are they

01:19:22.700 celebrated

01:19:23.360 or are they

01:19:23.880 derided

01:19:24.400 those voices

01:19:25.020 what happens

01:19:26.400 when they

01:19:26.780 are put

01:19:27.300 forward

01:19:27.640 are they

01:19:28.520 appreciated

01:19:29.140 are they

01:19:29.460 applauded

01:19:29.940 or are they

01:19:30.380 ignored

01:19:31.260 or derided

01:19:31.700 they're derided

01:19:32.240 and ignored

01:19:32.640 every time

01:19:33.160 I haven't

01:19:34.380 heard a

01:19:34.620 single

01:19:34.920 politician

01:19:35.440 praise

01:19:36.000 Miss

01:19:36.600 Faulkner

01:19:36.920 for her

01:19:37.280 intervention

01:19:37.600 I certainly

01:19:38.800 haven't heard

01:19:39.300 anyone

01:19:39.640 come out

01:19:40.460 to bat

01:19:40.680 for Wazik

01:19:41.100 Wazik

01:19:41.360 a very

01:19:41.700 brave

01:19:41.940 man

01:19:42.140 so yeah

01:19:43.440 it's going

01:19:44.100 to take

01:19:44.440 a lot

01:19:45.100 of people

01:19:45.360 coming forward

01:19:46.020 to give

01:19:46.620 this the

01:19:47.020 cultural

01:19:47.620 capital it

01:19:48.180 needs as

01:19:48.500 well for it

01:19:48.880 to be

01:19:49.040 something

01:19:49.180 overcome

01:19:49.520 but I

01:19:50.420 think it's

01:19:50.800 Elon Musk

01:19:51.180 that's done

01:19:51.440 it right

01:19:51.720 it's impossible

01:19:53.880 to ignore

01:19:55.180 when it's that

01:19:55.760 loud

01:19:56.000 and it's that

01:19:57.360 sentencing remark

01:19:58.060 he took from

01:19:58.560 Oxford

01:19:58.800 one of the

01:19:59.180 trials

01:19:59.480 there are many

01:20:00.680 more horrendous

01:20:01.180 paragraphs like

01:20:01.780 that when he

01:20:02.140 showed what

01:20:03.060 one of the

01:20:03.720 offenders

01:20:04.180 Carra had

01:20:05.200 done in

01:20:05.520 Oxford

01:20:05.780 about the

01:20:06.680 branding of

01:20:07.260 the girl

01:20:07.640 about the

01:20:08.480 gang rape

01:20:08.980 the torture 0.99

01:20:09.640 torture is

01:20:10.440 used in

01:20:10.820 this

01:20:11.000 so often

01:20:12.440 you hear

01:20:12.860 torture

01:20:13.300 in the

01:20:13.620 prosecution

01:20:14.080 it was

01:20:16.780 him saying

01:20:17.660 that

01:20:18.020 that I

01:20:18.860 think

01:20:19.000 made people

01:20:19.300 realise

01:20:19.640 and wake

01:20:19.960 up to

01:20:20.180 what it

01:20:20.300 was

01:20:20.500 yeah

01:20:21.660 so

01:20:22.060 more noise

01:20:23.740 but also

01:20:24.240 more noise

01:20:25.380 from more

01:20:25.660 people

01:20:25.940 a broader

01:20:26.500 range

01:20:26.720 that'll

01:20:26.940 make a

01:20:27.140 difference

01:20:27.440 it's

01:20:29.480 something

01:20:29.740 that should

01:20:30.160 be front

01:20:30.540 page

01:20:30.840 news

01:20:31.240 until it

01:20:31.940 gets dealt

01:20:32.800 with

01:20:33.020 every day

01:20:33.560 is how

01:20:34.020 I feel

01:20:34.340 about it

01:20:34.840 I'm very

01:20:36.080 grateful for

01:20:36.600 the work

01:20:36.900 you're doing

01:20:37.240 Charlie

01:20:37.520 it's very

01:20:37.900 important

01:20:38.220 and you

01:20:38.780 certainly

01:20:39.060 convinced me

01:20:39.640 about the

01:20:40.000 national inquiry

01:20:40.660 I think

01:20:41.120 a lot of

01:20:41.900 us are

01:20:42.100 very sceptical

01:20:42.740 but I

01:20:45.000 think the

01:20:45.320 pressure needs

01:20:45.780 to be put

01:20:46.180 on and

01:20:46.980 we'll certainly

01:20:47.500 keep doing

01:20:48.020 it and I

01:20:48.400 hope you

01:20:48.660 keep doing

01:20:49.100 it

01:20:49.300 it's my

01:20:50.440 obsession

01:20:50.780 frankly

01:20:51.160 so I

01:20:51.460 will

01:20:51.560 well

01:20:52.120 of all

01:20:52.780 the things

01:20:53.180 that a

01:20:53.580 young man

01:20:53.940 could be

01:20:54.300 obsessed

01:20:54.640 about

01:20:54.920 actually

01:20:55.240 protecting

01:20:55.740 people

01:20:56.100 who've

01:20:56.340 been

01:20:56.500 treated

01:20:56.800 in this

01:20:57.160 way

01:20:57.440 and

01:20:57.780 then

01:20:58.000 not

01:20:58.320 backed

01:20:59.040 or

01:20:59.280 protected

01:20:59.780 by the

01:21:00.180 people

01:21:00.380 whose job

01:21:00.780 it is

01:21:01.000 to protect

01:21:01.500 them

01:21:01.700 and then

01:21:02.440 ignored

01:21:02.760 by the

01:21:03.120 people

01:21:03.320 whose job

01:21:03.680 it is

01:21:03.880 to report

01:21:04.300 on it

01:21:04.600 that's a

01:21:05.160 pretty good

01:21:05.440 thing to be

01:21:05.840 obsessed

01:21:06.140 about

01:21:06.380 so we

01:21:07.440 appreciate

01:21:07.780 you and

01:21:08.060 thanks for

01:21:08.460 the work

01:21:09.040 you're doing

01:21:09.400 we're going

01:21:10.440 to ask you

01:21:10.740 some questions

01:21:11.200 from our

01:21:12.220 supporters

01:21:12.660 in a second 0.78

01:21:13.260 on Substack

01:21:14.220 but we

01:21:15.240 I think

01:21:15.820 in your

01:21:16.720 case

01:21:16.940 it'd be

01:21:17.240 useful

01:21:17.640 if you

01:21:17.980 perhaps

01:21:18.340 when you

01:21:18.920 answer our

01:21:19.280 final question

01:21:19.780 which is

01:21:20.060 what's the

01:21:20.340 one thing

01:21:20.560 we're not

01:21:20.900 talking about

01:21:21.600 maybe it's

01:21:22.480 something to

01:21:22.940 do with

01:21:23.240 this that

01:21:23.620 we've

01:21:24.180 missed

01:21:24.480 or not

01:21:25.760 perhaps

01:21:26.440 there's

01:21:27.320 something very

01:21:27.880 interesting

01:21:28.300 where you've

01:21:29.760 mentioned it

01:21:30.280 in other

01:21:30.660 interviews

01:21:31.160 Charlie

01:21:31.540 where you

01:21:31.900 talk about

01:21:32.640 the statistics

01:21:33.980 the two

01:21:35.180 in every

01:21:35.580 thousand

01:21:36.100 etc

01:21:36.620 etc

01:21:37.180 because I

01:21:38.120 think those

01:21:38.680 are really

01:21:39.140 quite shocking

01:21:39.800 and horrifying

01:21:40.340 and we

01:21:41.260 didn't actually

01:21:41.680 touch on it

01:21:42.220 in the main

01:21:42.580 interview

01:21:43.020 I wish you

01:21:44.240 did three

01:21:44.440 more of

01:21:44.740 these

01:21:44.900 there's so

01:21:46.880 much to

01:21:47.100 get through

01:21:47.400 you mentioned

01:21:48.360 actually right

01:21:48.720 at the beginning

01:21:48.960 about terminology

01:21:49.780 I want to get

01:21:50.700 onto this

01:21:50.980 before we

01:21:51.260 finish

01:21:51.480 because it's

01:21:51.840 important

01:21:52.020 because I

01:21:53.200 think you

01:21:53.440 mentioned it

01:21:53.820 because you're

01:21:54.380 concerned about

01:21:54.820 the term

01:21:55.220 grooming

01:21:55.560 right

01:21:55.820 perhaps a bit

01:21:56.520 of course

01:21:57.120 well it's a

01:21:57.740 euphemism

01:21:58.220 that covers

01:21:58.820 up the

01:21:59.240 reality of

01:21:59.860 what these

01:22:00.160 things are

01:22:00.620 I've heard

01:22:00.820 this a lot

01:22:01.200 there's a lot

01:22:03.100 of good reason

01:22:03.560 behind having

01:22:04.040 that concern

01:22:04.560 grooming gang

01:22:05.540 does not

01:22:06.900 even go close

01:22:07.760 to being far

01:22:09.100 enough to

01:22:09.480 summarising some

01:22:10.160 of the abuse

01:22:10.580 that these

01:22:11.260 children endured

01:22:11.880 but it is really

01:22:12.960 important to keep

01:22:13.520 using the term

01:22:13.900 grooming

01:22:14.160 I prefer 1.00

01:22:15.100 grooming rape 0.99

01:22:16.300 gang 0.99

01:22:16.580 or grooming

01:22:17.600 torture gang

01:22:18.120 grooming abuse

01:22:18.680 gang

01:22:18.860 I always include

01:22:20.320 the word grooming

01:22:20.800 because it's a

01:22:21.940 very specific

01:22:22.920 form of child

01:22:24.340 sexual exploitation

01:22:25.180 the grooming

01:22:25.660 model and the

01:22:26.140 boyfriend model

01:22:26.740 of exploitation

01:22:27.280 where you

01:22:28.080 convince a

01:22:28.820 child that

01:22:29.380 what's happening

01:22:29.880 to them is

01:22:30.280 normal

01:22:30.640 you do

01:22:31.420 literally

01:22:32.060 groom them

01:22:32.620 people say

01:22:33.180 oh grooming

01:22:33.600 is what you

01:22:33.820 do to pets

01:22:34.340 not to children

01:22:34.940 no these

01:22:36.160 perpetrators

01:22:36.780 do groom

01:22:37.380 these children

01:22:37.840 okay

01:22:38.180 I've been

01:22:39.620 really distressed

01:22:40.380 actually by the

01:22:40.780 number of comments

01:22:41.280 I've seen about

01:22:41.740 that in response

01:22:42.280 to work on this

01:22:42.860 recently

01:22:43.140 they do

01:22:45.320 make them feel

01:22:45.960 as though

01:22:46.180 they're loved

01:22:46.600 a lot of

01:22:47.320 these girls 0.99

01:22:47.640 as you've

01:22:48.040 mentioned

01:22:48.220 these boys

01:22:48.560 as well

01:22:48.740 they come

01:22:49.060 from appallingly

01:22:49.860 difficult backgrounds

01:22:50.780 they're in care

01:22:51.500 some of the

01:22:52.080 some of the

01:22:52.500 children are

01:22:52.860 like given

01:22:53.220 money when

01:22:53.780 they were

01:22:54.000 kids

01:22:54.280 by people

01:22:54.780 who looked

01:22:55.020 after them

01:22:55.300 to reward

01:22:55.740 them for

01:22:56.020 doing basic

01:22:56.640 stuff

01:22:56.960 a quid

01:22:57.640 for making

01:22:58.020 your bed

01:22:58.420 at a care

01:22:59.220 home

01:22:59.460 you know

01:23:00.120 so they're

01:23:00.360 rewarded

01:23:00.780 for something

01:23:01.640 like that

01:23:02.000 and then

01:23:02.460 imagine

01:23:02.680 what it's

01:23:02.920 like you

01:23:03.120 go out

01:23:03.380 of your

01:23:04.080 care home

01:23:04.720 age 12

01:23:05.320 or you

01:23:05.840 come out

01:23:06.040 of school

01:23:06.400 or you

01:23:07.860 know you

01:23:08.020 get away

01:23:08.240 from your

01:23:08.460 parents

01:23:08.720 for a

01:23:08.940 minute

01:23:09.060 and someone

01:23:09.680 gives you

01:23:10.500 all the

01:23:11.200 lavish love

01:23:11.820 and attention

01:23:12.260 in the

01:23:12.520 world

01:23:12.840 they think

01:23:13.940 you're the

01:23:14.180 best thing

01:23:14.640 since sliced

01:23:15.120 bread

01:23:15.320 they make

01:23:15.740 you feel

01:23:16.060 incredible

01:23:16.600 that's

01:23:17.360 grooming

01:23:17.620 that's

01:23:18.060 what's

01:23:18.240 going on

01:23:18.800 and

01:23:19.340 plying

01:23:20.560 them

01:23:20.860 with

01:23:21.260 alcohol

01:23:22.080 and drugs

01:23:23.320 is always

01:23:24.040 mentioned

01:23:24.380 it's a

01:23:24.700 really common

01:23:25.160 form

01:23:25.380 it's the

01:23:25.680 classic

01:23:26.100 form of

01:23:26.580 exploitation

01:23:26.980 in this

01:23:27.400 case

01:23:27.600 but it

01:23:28.300 starts with

01:23:28.760 sweets

01:23:29.300 starts with

01:23:30.640 a little

01:23:30.820 treat

01:23:31.200 starts with

01:23:32.320 a little

01:23:32.440 bit of

01:23:32.620 love

01:23:32.840 starts with

01:23:33.240 a bit

01:23:33.260 of attention

01:23:33.620 starts with

01:23:34.480 making a

01:23:35.280 child feel

01:23:35.740 as though

01:23:35.960 they're

01:23:36.160 special

01:23:36.480 when

01:23:36.880 everything

01:23:37.340 else

01:23:38.540 in the

01:23:38.660 world

01:23:38.760 is

01:23:39.180 conspiring

01:23:39.880 to make

01:23:40.160 them feel

01:23:40.420 like

01:23:40.620 dirt

01:23:40.960 so I

01:23:41.800 will

01:23:42.180 plea

01:23:43.800 with

01:23:44.020 people

01:23:44.300 listening

01:23:44.660 and

01:23:44.780 watching

01:23:44.960 to keep

01:23:45.440 using

01:23:45.640 the term

01:23:45.940 grooming

01:23:46.240 because

01:23:47.040 survivors

01:23:47.640 I know

01:23:48.100 are also

01:23:49.360 concerned

01:23:49.780 that the

01:23:50.280 word

01:23:50.440 grooming

01:23:50.600 is being

01:23:50.820 cut

01:23:51.060 from

01:23:51.220 this

01:23:51.360 because

01:23:51.560 it's

01:23:51.740 what

01:23:51.980 they

01:23:52.340 endured

01:23:52.820 they

01:23:53.220 were

01:23:53.340 made

01:23:53.660 to

01:23:53.820 feel

01:23:54.020 as though

01:23:54.240 what

01:23:54.380 happened

01:23:54.740 was

01:23:54.940 normal

01:23:55.260 even

01:23:55.780 while

01:23:56.020 they

01:23:56.140 were

01:23:56.220 being

01:23:56.380 abused

01:23:56.780 they

01:23:56.980 called

01:23:57.280 their

01:23:57.460 abusers

01:23:57.840 their

01:23:58.040 boyfriends

01:23:58.460 because

01:23:58.660 they were

01:23:58.920 children

01:23:59.340 didn't

01:24:00.400 know

01:24:00.720 any

01:24:06.480 everyone

01:24:06.840 gets

01:24:07.180 a

01:24:07.300 number

01:24:07.420 you

01:24:07.580 never

01:24:07.800 know

01:24:07.980 when

01:24:08.100 you

01:24:08.160 get

01:24:08.380 called

01:24:08.680 and

01:24:08.800 what's

01:24:08.960 going

01:24:09.080 to

01:24:09.160 go

01:24:09.340 on

01:24:09.480 it

01:24:09.560 because

01:24:09.660 it's

01:24:09.720 normalised

01:24:11.860 they're

01:24:12.300 groomed

01:24:12.580 into

01:24:12.760 believing

01:24:13.660 it's

01:24:13.860 normal

01:24:14.080 that's

01:24:15.780 really

01:24:15.940 important

01:24:16.220 I think

01:24:16.580 on to

01:24:18.000 the

01:24:18.120 numbers

01:24:18.540 the

01:24:19.200 numbers

01:24:20.160 in this

01:24:22.500 story

01:24:22.800 in the

01:24:23.140 cycle

01:24:23.440 of how

01:24:23.760 you

01:24:23.900 get

01:24:24.080 a

01:24:24.220 story

01:24:24.520 it's

01:24:24.900 collection

01:24:25.600 processing

01:24:27.000 analysis

01:24:28.000 and

01:24:28.320 dissemination

01:24:28.980 sometimes

01:24:29.360 you flip

01:24:30.080 around the

01:24:30.380 processing

01:24:30.820 and analysis

01:24:31.260 you work

01:24:32.160 out how

01:24:32.500 you're

01:24:32.680 going to

01:24:32.820 deal

01:24:32.980 with what

01:24:33.220 you've

01:24:33.380 got

01:24:33.600 how

01:24:33.880 you collect

01:24:36.480 what

01:24:36.800 you

01:24:36.920 think

01:24:37.120 about

01:24:37.320 it

01:24:37.520 what's

01:24:38.480 the

01:24:38.600 best

01:24:38.780 way

01:24:38.940 to

01:24:39.120 summarise

01:24:39.560 this

01:24:39.700 story

01:24:39.940 how do

01:24:40.260 I

01:24:40.340 frame

01:24:40.640 it

01:24:40.880 what's

01:24:41.480 the

01:24:41.580 top

01:24:41.760 line

01:24:42.060 who else

01:24:43.440 am I going to speak to which experts will I get on that

01:24:45.220 the hardest bit of any part of journalism is dissemination

01:24:49.480 how 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

01:25:02.800 summarise it

01:25:03.600 it's really

01:25:04.160 it's really difficult

01:25:04.800 it'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

01:25:32.220 liberal and well-meaning on open borders adjacent associates completely just go wow you're so right

01:25:39.020 between 1997

01:25:41.600 2016

01:25:42.800 one in every

01:25:44.900 2,200

01:25:46.140 Muslim men

01:25:47.440 over 16

01:25:48.240 in this country

01:25:49.140 were prosecuted

01:25:50.560 for group localized child sexual exploitation

01:25:53.360 one in every

01:25:54.940 2,200

01:25:56.020 right

01:25:57.020 Telford

01:25:58.880 Telford it was

01:25:59.160 one in every

01:25:59.940 120

01:26:00.440 something

01:26:01.000 Rochdale a little less

01:26:02.600 in Rotherham

01:26:04.140 it was

01:26:04.960 one in

01:26:05.640 73

01:26:06.600 men

01:26:07.540 from

01:26:08.740 a

01:26:09.080 Pakistani

01:26:09.620 background

01:26:10.200 with a Pakistani name

01:26:12.480 in the trials

01:26:14.140 all the court records you can go through

01:26:15.940 one in

01:26:16.940 73

01:26:17.620 being prosecuted

01:26:18.980 these are not

01:26:20.080 isolated cases

01:26:21.280 from a community

01:26:22.300 this is a community that knows

01:26:24.120 what is going on

01:26:25.260 okay

01:26:26.200 these are clans

01:26:28.700 operating

01:26:29.540 with the support of one another

01:26:31.640 trafficking to each other

01:26:33.220 and those numbers are

01:26:34.960 unavoidable

01:26:36.800 anyone who reads those

01:26:38.700 figures

01:26:39.240 can't escape them

01:26:40.600 okay

01:26:41.040 and that's just been collated for a 20 year period

01:26:43.580 and that's just from prosecutions

01:26:46.780 in an era when the state and the prosecutions haven't wanted to take place

01:26:50.860 right

01:26:51.160 many still are pending

01:26:52.660 the National Crime Agency's investigation into Rotherham has dozens of live investigations ongoing

01:26:57.880 I expect I will attend many more openings of many more trials in Sheffield in Manchester

01:27:03.480 and any other crown courts around the country for many years to come

01:27:07.040 1 in 73 is

01:27:09.980 not as bad as it actually is for Rotherham

01:27:12.520 I think

01:27:13.120 I think it's far worse

01:27:14.060 1 in 2200

01:27:15.720 is an insufficient

01:27:17.640 summary in the numbers of what's going on

01:27:20.180 that is a small stat

01:27:21.120 it's tighter than that

01:27:22.120 it's worse than that

01:27:23.040 I think

01:27:25.060 if you take anything away from all of this

01:27:26.980 it's that those numbers

01:27:28.840 point to the fact

01:27:29.840 that this is

01:27:31.140 a clannish

01:27:32.820 cultural cover-up

01:27:34.120 with a community

01:27:35.980 which is struggling

01:27:37.000 with concepts of honour and shame

01:27:39.220 in child abuse

01:27:40.220 and that prefers to look the other way

01:27:42.260 when this is going on

01:27:43.380 and it has to be confronted

01:27:44.960 Charlie

01:27:46.000 thank you so much for coming on the show

01:27:47.840 and for all your work

01:27:48.660 thanks for having me

01:27:49.400 thank you

01:27:50.160 make sure to join us on Substack

01:27:51.920 where we carry on the conversation

01:27:53.320 you know how superheroes

01:27:56.460 always show up right when you need them

01:27:58.180 that's what the Connecticut Children's Doctors

01:28:00.200 are like at the

01:28:00.940 Cohen Pediatric Emergency Center

01:28:02.660 at Norwalk Hospital

01:28:03.660 they're from the only health system

01:28:05.360 in the state

01:28:05.880 that's 100% for kids

01:28:07.500 the rooms here are bright

01:28:09.300 there's a giant turtle on the wall

01:28:11.120 and you might even see

01:28:12.380 a child life specialist too

01:28:13.700 they're the ones who help kids feel calm

01:28:15.740 so yeah

01:28:16.480 let's hope you'll never have to visit

01:28:18.160 but if you do

01:28:19.140 they'll be ready

01:28:20.080 Norwalk Hospital

01:28:21.840 is joining Northwell

01:28:23.020 for a new era in your care

01:28:24.540 if you're looking for a career

01:28:30.280 in a research sector

01:28:31.520 with an assured future

01:28:33.100 the specialized jobs

01:28:34.420 offer a concrete training

01:28:35.920 competitive salaries

01:28:37.200 and real chances of progressing

01:28:38.960 Components Canada Ontario

01:28:40.860 is accompanied with

01:28:41.720 dynamic programs

01:28:42.780 and competitions

01:28:43.540 that open doors

01:28:44.660 to plenty of opportunities

01:28:45.980 discover the job

01:28:47.460 that you passioned

01:28:48.320 and leave your mark

01:28:49.080 in your community

01:28:50.020 to know more

01:28:51.820 skillsontario.com

01:28:53.720 and commence

01:28:54.340 to build your life

01:28:54.940 and build your life

01:28:55.440 dès aujourd'hui

01:28:56.240 Canada

01:29:06.120 andInaudible

01:29:06.560 Canada

01:29:06.660 the

01:29:07.340 Canada

01:29:07.740 of Canada

01:29:08.240 and

01:29:09.040 in the

01:29:10.160 Canada

TRIGGERnometry - February 05, 2025

The UNCENSORED Truth About Grooming Gangs - Charlie Peters

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript