Patrick Christys: Lack of police action against grooming gangs is staggering

Grooming gangs have not gone away, they’re not a thing of the past.

While police and politicians bury their heads in the sand and worry about being called racist, up and down the country vulnerable young girls are being systematically abused on an industrial scale by, predominantly, South Asian men.

The scale of the problem is absolutely vast. We’ve had instances in Rotherham, Rochdale, Huddersfield, Aylesbury, Newcastle, Keithley, Oxford, Telford, Manchester – in that case Greater Manchester Police identified more than 800 members of that gang.

When the initial Rotherham grooming gangs scandal broke, I think it shocked people. A report into it unearthed that an estimated 1,400 children, had been sexually abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013 by predominantly British-Pakistani men.

The abuse included gang rape, forcing children to watch rape, dousing them with petrol and threatening to set them on fire, threatening to rape their mothers and younger sisters, and trafficking them to other towns. There were pregnancies—one at age 12—terminations, miscarriages, babies raised by their mothers, and babies removed, and, of course, trauma caused and lives shattered forever.

The lack of police and political action on this was staggering, and a leaked report from the Independent Office for Police Conduct revealed that police were too afraid of stoking racial tensions to get right to the heart of the problem.

Well, while you’re afraid of being called racist, working class, vulnerable girls are being systematically abused by organised rape squads on an industrial scale.

The implication there, and whether this is true or not, but it’s the way it looks, is that authorities have decided that being called racist is worse than a young girl being abused. To me, that’s the decision that it looks like the police have made.

And it doesn’t just stop with the police. It runs right through the media. When the Telford grooming scandal happened it was, at the time, the UK’s largest ever child sexual exploitation case. How did the BBC report it? They put it as a secondary story on their local Shropshire page on their news site.

So if you wanted to find out about the UK’s largest ever grooming scandal, you had to go to the local news section of the BBC website and scroll down a bit. Presumably this, again, is because they don’t want to stoke racial tensions.

But isn’t there already racism involved? Reporting the facts is not racist, predominantly South Asian grooming gangs systematically targeting young vulnerable white girls because there is a sense that they are lesser than other people, that they don’t matter – I’d argue that there’s an element of racism involved in that.

So who are the racists here? And when we do catch these people, they usually just serve a few years in prison and then they’re released back out into the same communities they terrorised before so they can bump into their victims in the local shops.

And we don’t really deport them - Adil Khan was one of nine men jailed in 2012 for multiple offences in Rochdale. He’s fighting his deportation. He received 13 years in prison, but was out on license in just four. You know what he said at his hearing?

We are not that big a criminal, we have not committed that big a crime," he said, adding: "I'm innocent." He got a 13-year-old girl pregnant and then trafficked a 15-year-old girl to others using violence when she complained.

Qari Rauf, another member of the Rochdale gang, ended up serving just two years and six months behind bars. But despite all of this, it’s still happening.

Our reporter Kevin Larkin revealed live on GB News yesterday that in Rotherham, there are multiple cases of Child Sexual Exploitation taking place and it appears, although police and the local council deny this, that the investigation into this is half-baked to say the least.

There is an allegation that police have been told about a property where CSE takes place after 10pm, they sent an officer round at 6pm and concluded that nothing bad was going on.

Instead of treating the tens of thousands of vulnerable child victims as an inconvenience, why don’t police and politicians treat them as what they are – human beings, human beings who are being broken.