The full, horrifying truth about Britain’s grooming gangs must finally be exposed – Katie Lam

Thank you for subscribing!

Katie Lam writes how vulnerable girls were failed by the very institutions that should have protected them

The grooming and rape gangs, which have terrorised so many towns and cities in this country, are responsible for some of the most horrific crimes in this country’s history.

For decades, gangs of men – the majority of whom were from Pakistan or of Pakistani heritage, in the cases that we know about in detail – raped, abused and trafficked thousands of children, the majority of whom were white working-class girls.

These gangs preyed upon the vulnerable in dozens of towns and cities across the country.

And for decades, that horrific reality was ignored because people in positions of power were scared of confronting the uncomfortable truth about who was committing these crimes and who their victims were.

Among police officers, council officials and care home staff, fears about being called racist trumped the duty of care that they owed to these girls.

The result was one of the most widespread and shocking cover-ups in our history.

Last year, the Government was forced to hold a proper national inquiry into these horrendous crimes.

The inquiry’s work is ongoing, and we hope that it will finally uncover the full truth about the grooming gang horrors.

The survivors, whistleblowers, journalists, activists and researchers who helped to secure that inquiry were incredibly brave, and we owe them an unbelievable debt of gratitude.

But in the meantime, new independent research, published as part of The Network Map project, has revealed the extent to which the grooming gangs were, and are, closely linked to national networks of organised criminals.

That project has uncovered well over 4,000 connections between grooming gang abusers, criminal gangs and ‘notable individuals’ – including politicians, employees of the British state and business owners.

The findings of that research are truly horrific; I cannot encourage you enough to go away and read them for yourself.

The first is the extent to which these gangs operated as part of a nationwide web.

Gangs of rapists collaborated with one another to traffic and transport their victims across the country – as the testimony of many grooming gang survivors confirms.

The second is the extent to which these gangs often operated along family lines.

This includes cases like those of the Ilyas brothers, three men who groomed girls as young as 12 years old in the Sheffield area between 2004 and 2008.

The fact that many of these gangs included brothers and cousins working together to carry out the most horrific abuse must invite questions about the cultural factors that led to these crimes, and the role that close-knit families or clans played in facilitating them.

The third takeaway is the extent to which these abusers were linked to organised crime networks, particularly those in the drugs trade and those operating protection rackets.

These include some of the abusers who targeted Bradford survivor Fiona Goddard.

Parvaze Ahmed, one of Fiona’s abusers, was a known drug dealer and the brother-in-law of so-called “drugs baron” Khalid Malik.

These links to organised crime undoubtedly enabled these men to coerce, intimidate and traffic their victims.

As the national inquiry into grooming gangs continues its work, it must investigate the link between these horrific crimes and organised criminal gangs.

Its recommendations must reflect the reality that these men used their relationships with criminal gangs to coerce, abuse and traffic their victims.

For far too long, victims and the public have been denied the full facts about why these crimes happened and why they were allowed to go on for so long.