Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer this week responded to criticism that as Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008-13, he had failed to go after gangs that sexually exploited children.
Starmer has faced days of abuse on X (formerly Twitter) over the child grooming scandal that surfaced in the mid-2000s, in which men, many of British Pakistani heritage, were alleged to have systematically raped and trafficked girls as young as 11.
The charge against Starmer has been led by the billionaire owner of X, Elon Musk, a close aide of United States President-elect Donald Trump, who has used his platform’s megaphone to launch attacks on several European leaders.
‘Grooming’ of a child
Grooming is when an adult establishes a relationship of trust with a minor — often targeting vulnerable children — with the intention of initiating an exploitative sexual relationship.
Offenders typically befriend the child through gifts, attention, and considerate behaviour, and then exploit the resultant relationship to coerce or frighten the child into sexual contact.
The cases in the UK
Several instances of gangs exploiting children were reported in British towns such as Rotherham, Bristol, Cornwall, and Oxford from the late 1990s to about 2012. In many of these cases, the offenders were of Pakistani origin.
The gangs often preyed on girls in care homes, or from broken families. Thousands of girls were befriended, plied with alcohol and drugs, and gangraped and trafficked.
Some of the survivors have written accounts of their ordeal. An excerpt from one such book, Prey: My Fight to Survive the Halifax Grooming Gang, reads: “…The pick-ups (by the grooming gang) had become so frequent that I barely spent any time in the house at all. The guys would come by, put me in a car and take me away for the night, or longer. Sometimes I would disappear for days at a time. The booze and all the drugs wiped me out for hours.”
The girl, Cassie Pike, was only 11 at the time, with a mother dying of Huntington’s disease, a degenerative disease of the brain cells, and a violent, substance addict father.
Over the years, British police have faced criticism for not joining the dots and reading the pattern when various individual cases were reported to them, for not taking victims seriously, and for allegedly going slow on investigations because they did not want to ignite sectarian tensions and were afraid of being seen as racist.
However, no evidence of a systematic cover-up has been found.
A recent report by the BBC recalled, “An inquiry into abuse in Rotherham found 1,400 children had been sexually abused over a 16-year period, predominantly by British Pakistani men. An investigation in Telford found that up to 1,000 girls had been abused over 40 years — and that some cases had not been investigated because of “nervousness about race””.
The current context
In October last year, Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips rejected a request for a national inquiry into the sexual exploitation cases in Oldham, saying that an ongoing local inquiry should be allowed to proceed.
The issue began gaining steam on social media, and blew up after Musk used it to target Phillips and Starmer. Since then, politicians from the opposition Conservative and Reform UK parties have also repeatedly raised the matter.
Phillips told the BBC’s Newsnight program on Tuesday that “disinformation” spread by Musk – he has called Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” – was “endangering” her, but “I’m no stranger to people who don’t know what they’re talking about trying to silence women like me”.
The far right in Europe and the US has used the cases to push several racist narratives while arguing against immigration.
Inquiry into cases
The report of a national inquiry held over seven years was published in 2022. It made 20 recommendations, which are yet to be implemented. British academic Alexis Jay, who headed that inquiry, has said that the victims “want action”, and not another inquiry.
The recommendations include setting up a national child protection authority; stricter rules around who can work with vulnerable children; making not reporting child sex abuse an offence (which the government announced on Monday it will do this year); making grooming an aggravating factor when sentencing a child abuse convict; and improve the information gathering on children’s exploitation.
The government has said it is working on the last two recommendations.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that Starmer headed between 2008 and 2013 has admitted in the past that it could have done more to help the grooming victims. But Starmer’s role has been lauded by many.
The Financial Times quoted Nazir Afzal, a former chief prosecutor for north-west England, as saying, “Keir left in 2013, the CPS having gone from being dire at doing sex-abuse cases to having the highest conviction rate in our history. That wouldn’t have been possible without the support, resources and the protection I was given by Keir, at a time when it would have been easier to give up.”
In 2013, Starmer improved CPS guidelines on dealing with child victims of sexual abuse.
While UK PM Starmer defended himself, he did not name Musk. (Photos: Reuters) 
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