"I am now going to quote extensively from the first case study in the February 2022 report, concerning a child named in the report as CS-A12 (bold emphasis mine):
CS-A12 described her stepfather’s regular violence towards her and her mother. At age 12, she started running away from her home. She self-harmed and was treated for depression. Shortly afterwards, in the mid-2000s, CS-A12 was placed in residential care. She said that staff “just left me basically to do what I wanted”.
She explained how she met adult men who gave her alcohol and drugs and sexually exploited her over the following three to four years: “They pretended that I was part of their family. They gave me what I was lacking at the care home. They gave me somewhere where I felt like I belonged and somewhere where I felt like I was wanted”.
Police often stopped cars in which CS-A12 was with her abusers. She told us that while the police often asked her age and identified that she was missing from care, no action was taken against the men. She said she was regularly told that she was wasting police time: “One police officer told me I was what was going wrong in our society and that I was the type of person that was bringing about a bad society … Another one said that we were going to get these men in trouble because we wanted to act like child prostitutes”.
CS-A12 said that the care home staff knew that she and other girls were being given alcohol and drugs by adult men. Staff helped one girl to select an outfit for a “date” with a 30-year-old male. They missed many opportunities to end the abuse, for example, when the men bought CS-A12 gifts or dropped her off at the care home when drunk. Instead, she said: “I was told by the staff that I was attention seeking and stuff like that, which I probably was, to be honest, I probably was … crying for help, trying to get someone to notice that something wasn’t right, but no one ever paid attention. I were just treated like I was disgusting for doing it, not that there was a reason behind me doing it.”
That there is a problem with a culture of not speaking out and speaking the truth, that the state is hidebound by a “computer says no” culture . . . these are regular preoccupations of Badenoch’s. In my view, there is some merit to her view that these can be important issues and flaws explaining why the state fails in some instances.
However, what we see uncovered in the extensive inquiry into the issue of grooming gangs reveals a far graver issue. Frankly a “computer says no” culture, or “a culture of silence” would represent considerable upgrades on what we see in the 2022 reports. What we observe there is a culture of active complicity with people abusing children, a complicity driven by a cocktail of misogyny and classism.
I cannot look into Badenoch’s mind and know whether she has read and absorbed any or all of the inquiry reports. Yet her claims about the shortcomings of previous inquiries and her diagnosis of the underlying problem of grooming gangs seem no different than if she had ignored the evidence, and had instead decided that the real problem were her usual fixed explanations for state failure."
