
Rape Crisis England & Wales' CEO, Ciara Bergman, shares her opinion on the recently announced new measures from the Home Office to tackle grooming gangs.
The Rt Hon Yvette Cooper recently announced two new measures aimed at better protecting victims of child sexual exploitation - a mandatory reporting duty, and a commitment to establish a core data set on child sexual abuse. After extensive pressure, the Home Secretary last week went further, announcing £5m in national funding for local inquiries including into the rape and sexual abuse of girls in Oldham, and a clear timeline for implementing all of the remaining recommendations made by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).
The broader context around the grooming gangs inquiry
Inquiries can offer a great deal of insight and lead to important learning and improvements, but they can also be repetitive, costly, and time-consuming, and run the risk of diverting funding away from some of the most immediate, obvious and needed ways forward to improve the lives of those affected by rape and sexual abuse.
I worked with men who perpetrate sexual and domestic abuse for 20 years and never once ran a group or session in which they did not discuss the influence of their family and friends, media and broader culture on their attitudes and beliefs about the acceptability of violating and abusing women and girls. Nor have I ever assessed or worked with perpetrators without wondering how and why the communities, professionals, and policies around them failed to recognise or respond to what they were doing, or hold them accountable for it.
Reports about groups of men organising and participating in the rape, abuse and exploitation of vulnerable and largely working-class girls are not a new phenomenon, and nor are inquiries into them. In 2001 Rotherham police and council were informed about taxi drivers collecting young girls from care homes and sexually abusing them. In 2011, former MP Ann Cryer and health worker Sara Rowbotham reported their concerns about what was happening to girls in Rotherham to Times journalist Andrew Norfolk, who broke the first stories in the press.
In 2014 Professor Alexis Jay published the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham, and 2022 and 2024 saw the respective publications of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Telford, and the Review into Operation Span and non-recent child sexual exploitation in Rochdale. Perhaps the most notable inquiry was IICSA, commissioned in 2015 and published seven years later in 2022. Vast in scope and costing almost a quarter of a billion pounds, it drew criticism for failing to address the issue of grooming gangs sufficiently robustly.
One much commented-on factor in why professionals failed to identify or investigate this particular form of on-street grooming effectively, was institutional fear about accusations of racism given the widespread (and erroneous) perception that the majority of perpetrators of group-based child rape and sexual abuse are Asian or Muslims, and the conflation of race and ethnicity with someone’s propensity for risk and harm. But whilst this fear may well have contributed to failings, there are a plethora of wider challenges we must also contend with if we want to make meaningful progress on stopping and preventing sexual violence. Successive failures to properly address it have too often left a vacuum into which hateful rhetoric has been poured by those with little to no understanding of the lives or needs of survivors.
Enhancing women and girls' safety
Interventions specifically focused on sexual offending are few and far between, and we lack a robust evidence base about what works to prevent or stop it. But some of the simplest and most obvious routes to enhancing women and girls’ safety have never been scaled up and tested, despite some localised successes. And despite having enormous potential to help solve some of these complex challenges, the expertise within the specialist sexual violence sector has yet to be fully drawn on.
Ask any frontline sexual violence service what needs to change and they will tell you that health and social care professionals must urgently and drastically improve their recognition of – and response to – sexual violence and abuse, so that the catastrophic safeguarding failures and victim-blaming we saw in those cases is never repeated.
They’ll also tell you that the justice system must completely transform how it conceptualizes and investigates child rape and sexual abuse, and that suspect rather than victim-focused investigations - a cornerstone of Operation Soteria – should be adopted across all forces and investigations so that police officers never again deem 11-year-olds capable of consent, or ignore their suffering on the basis they were ‘undesirables’ anyway.
Rape culture and misogyny
We’re inundated daily with images and ideas of women as less than, expendable, rape-able, assaultable, unhuman, unworthy and important only insofar as they are sexually desirable to men, but we still struggle as a society, to talk about - or understand - rape. We also struggle to know how to talk about men in this context. About them being more likely than women to perpetrate nearly all forms of interpersonal violence, more likely to commit violent crime, and more likely to commit sexual offences than women when all other factors are accounted for. Being male does not mean someone will be sexually violent, but someone who has been sexually violent is overwhelmingly likely to be male.
Survivor needs
Survivors have consistently reported that what they need and want most, is for services to be available to them, but IICSA’s recommendation for “a guarantee of specialist therapeutic support for child victims of sexual abuse” has still not been implemented, and none of the £10m recently allocated funds for initiatives to support survivors have been ringfenced for the services who support them.
Our services worked with 80,000 survivors last year, nearly a quarter of whom were children. 1.5 million people accessed our website to find out how to access support and – inconceivable in its heartache to me - whether what happened to them ‘counted’. Our role is to make sure they know that it did. So amidst the current outrage and rhetoric about grooming gangs, the questions we are asking are: how much longer will women and girls wait for the support and services they need, and the justice and restitution they deserve?