Grooming gangs at the end of history

Many years ago, satirical newspaper the Onion ran a piece by the title “Fun Toy Banned Because Of Three Stupid Dead Kids”. The story was that an amazing toy had been withdrawn from the market after “three dumb kids managed to kill themselves […] ruining the fun for everybody else”.

I’d forgotten all about it until this week, when I heard Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart discussing child sexual abuse on their The Rest is Politics podcast. To be fair, it may not just have been the podcast that reminded me, but various other articles, social media posts and public statements regarding calls for a public inquiry into sexual abuse gangs. The Onion piece is obviously a joke, playing on the callousness of thinking a real tragedy is not three deaths, but no longer getting to play with the Aqua Assault Robofighter. With abuse gang discourse, I can’t help sensing something similar, albeit deadly serious. Something more along the lines of “my brilliant, pure, rational politics, tainted, because of some girls getting themselves abused”. 

To be clear, it is perfectly possible to think “grooming gangs” stories have been exploited for racist ends without feeling irritation at the stories being out there at all. As Julie Bindel, who has been campaigning on these issues since the nineties, recently argued that many who have shown little interest before have “suddenly become laser-focused on the sexual abuse of girls”. As Bindel points out, this does not mean we should ignore these stories, but that the right’s “focus on the ethnic origin and religious affiliation of a particular set of abusers” is worth investigating, too.

I am sure Campbell and Stewart would claim to agree with such sentiments — indeed, I’m confident they are wholly against what has happened to these girls. Nonetheless, what also comes through in their own podcast on the subject is a sense of exasperation at the fact people are still talking about it at all. Oh god, not that again! Campbell complains that Musk’s “Twitter rampage” on the topic meant that “stories which have been around in the British media and British politics for a while were suddenly felt to be newsworthy again”. He declares this “inconvenient, to say the least, for Keir Starmer”, before letting us know that he personally texted Tony Blair to ask how he would respond to it all. 

It all feels incredibly inappropriate — a deliberate effort to move something uncomfortable, distressing and messy onto the safer ground of rational, sensible, right-side-of-history men having rational, sensible, right-side-of-history discussions. One can of course argue that this is what this kind of podcast is about. It is not meant to be a detailed analysis of sexual abuse dynamics, male power or individual trauma. Nonetheless, it’s also clear that neither Campbell nor Stewart have been bothered to inform about even the basics of what happened. It was, Stewart suggests, only “between 1997 and 2013”; it was just Rotherham and Rochdale; it was abusers “meeting girls, generally between 13 and 16, disproportionately in care, making friends with them in the park, and then paying them for sex and then passing them round”. It was far more than that, and while Stewart is correct to say the story is also one of the failure of multiple institutions to whom victims should have been able to turn to help, it’s also clear that for him this about redirecting the spotlight. It is as though since what has happened cannot be undone, there is no point in being aware of all the details, so on to the problem progressive man can solve – the optics. It’s a familiar pattern, one which, ironically enough, is also encountered when dealing with stories of abuse that Stewart might find less politically inconvenient, at least from a distance. 

One common response to the current stories from the terminally rational and pure has been to remind us that most child sexual abuse happens in the home, at the hands of family members. People are good at being appalled by this in the abstract, but it is not as though real-life instances of intra-familial sexual abuse do not also get the “what’s done is done — the priority is keeping up appearances” treatment when victims complain. The “us against the world” dynamic that can operate in abusive families, in which perpetrators are protected and complainants pressured not to bring shame on the unit, is in many ways just a small-scale version of “I don’t want these abuse stories to mess with my tidy politics”. I often think people who insist “but abuse is worse in families” are the last people I’d trust with an actual story of familial abuse. They’d think “but not that family —- not that man”. Every account messes with someone’s perfect narrative.

Victim-blaming is subtle … It can be more a coldness, a looking away

A few years ago I made a statement to a public enquiry regarding sexual exploitation I’d witnessed in adolescent psychiatric care in the late eighties. What sticks with me is the impression that victims were actively resented by those who could have protected them, not in spite of their victimhood, but because of it. It made them a problem, an embarrassment, a challenge to deeply held beliefs about sexual liberalism and autonomy. Victim-blaming is subtle. It doesn’t have to be “well, it would happen to those kind of girls”. It can be more a coldness, a looking away, a greater willingness to decide that if some girls “choose” to put themselves at risk, inaction is acceptable. It can involve making victims feel as though their truths put others at risk, therefore are best downplayed, with the worst parts edited out (there are always worthy podcasters on hand to do the editing for you).  

Only these stories should be brought to light, and remain there. Sexual abuse stories can’t be rendered comfortable. They can’t be put into a neat, “us and them” context because the problem is so widespread, present in so many institutions and so many families, that they will always upend personal convictions about which groups are powerful, which are good, which are bad. The urge to tidy up the narrative is symptomatic of a culture in which individuals don’t so much disbelieve victims as place too much faith in the infallibility of their own politics, friendships, families and favoured groups. These stories should make you question the things you believe in, though. As long as they don’t, there will always be more of them.