Two weeks, two reports

A week ago, a report on a maternity care scandal in the Nottingham area was published. The Ockenden Maternity Review had been set up in May 2022 “following significant concerns raised regarding the quality and safety of maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) and concerns of local families”; this review replaced a prior regionally-led review as a result of families’ concerns. The week before, Rupert Lowe, founder and currently sole MP of the Restore Britain party, published his report from what he called his “Rape Gang Inquiry” (PDF), his crowd-funded inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. Excerpts from that review have been published verbatim or uncritically summarised in posts on social media and Substack, often accompanied with complaints about how it was ‘ignored’ by the mainstream media; Ockenden’s review was, by contrast, front-page news, as was Baroness Amos’s review into maternity services nationwide, along with a high-profile resignation from its board. (The charity Rape Crisis has given its response here.)

I mention the two together because the Ockenden review represents how long an inquiry into a major regional scandal can take when done properly; the RGI report shows how quickly you can do it if you have reached your conclusion before you start. So many injustices have taken years to put right — Bloody Sunday, Hillsborough and the Grenfell Tower disaster spring to mind. Lowe’s report consists of a summary, a long section consisting of survivor testimony from the inquiry (usually with first names as pseudonyms, though some are identifiable having spoken publicly) and four profiles of ‘whistleblowers’. These include a former UKIP councillor, Caven Vines, who was successfully sued for libel by two Rotherham Labour MPs, John Healey and Kevin Barron, for claiming they knew about grooming gang abuse but did nothing (Lowe omits to mention the UKIP link). He also includes three long paragraphs on “Tommy Robinson”, without giving his real name (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), portraying him as a man persecuted by the police for “exposing grooming gangs” and for “speaking publicly” after forming the English Defence League, rather than rightly prosecuted for assaults, mortgage fraud, use of a false passport, stalking and harassment, and interfering in a grooming gang case in a way that could prejudice it (everyone in the media here knows that is against the law).

Lowe presents claims from politicians as fact. There is a page and a half about the situation in London, where to date there has been no prosecution of anyone for grooming gang activity but which he alleges “stands exposed as the epicentre of institutional denial in the grooming gang scandal” and where “the scale of abuse … was more catastrophic than anywhere else in the country”, an extraordinary claim. It is entirely possible that London is not free of grooming gangs, but to claim it is worse than anywhere else and has been somehow covered up really needs proof, not mere claims from a Tory councillor in Harrow and an ex-cop on a video posted by the Daily Express’s YouTube channel. London is the centre of the national media and if there was evidence of a lot of such abuse going on, it could easily have been reported on. Lowe alleges that the Metropolitan Police “announced a review of 9,000 child sexual exploitation cases”, inviting the reader to assume (wrongly) that CSE and grooming gang activity are synonymous. In a chapter outlining the “Islamic” influence on the gangs, he quotes liberally from a pseudonymous misery memoir by one Hannah Shah. Other unreliable sources include a Triggernometry podcast episode and various politically biased think-tank reports (Policy Exchange and Quilliam for example).

His chapter on the “Islamic influence” contains a long list of supposed issues with Islam (often flimsily-understood concepts) that are actually irrelevant to this situation, not only because they are simply inapplicable to the situation (for example, the discourse on slavery and the Barbary pirates, who were from North Africa, which is nowhere near Pakistan, and the victims were not slaves) but because the major players in the gangs were not particularly religious and just used distorted, selective readings of Islam to justify their behaviour. Every aspect of their behaviour and the modus operandi of the grooming gangs goes against many aspects of Islamic law: most obviously, the prohibition of consuming or supplying alcohol or other narcotics, sex outside marriage, pimping, rape, deception (such as forming relationships with vulnerable girls to lure them into the clutches of the gangs), coming between girls and their parents, using violence and threats to keep victims in their grip and prevent them living their own lives, among many other things. None of this is jihad; it’s just criminality. Lowe cites a Dr Hill  As for Al-Wala’ w’al-Bara’ (loyalty and disavowal), it’s quite likely that most of these men had never heard the term but as said the late mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul-Aziz bin Baz, who took a hardline view of the concept, “Hating them and regarding them as enemies does not mean that you should mistreat them or transgress against them if they are not in a state of war with the Muslims”. Dr Hatem al-Haj gives a more nuanced view on the subject here.

Rupert Lowe makes no attempt at analysis beyond issues such as political correctness and fear of being perceived as racist. The various blogs and social media posts which parrot extracts from this report also relay this ‘analysis’ uncritically. To clarify, this was a reason some of the time but was not the reason all the time. As Maggie Oliver and others have mentioned, other reasons include laziness, political interference and classism and sexism within police forces and social work departments: the young victims were seen as difficult, uncooperative, “child prostitutes”, the authors of their own misfortune, among other things. Rape myths are common in society and police across the UK and overseas have been known to look for ways to dispose of rape complaints unless they meet common “classic rape” stereotypes; this was seen in the investigation into the “Black Cab rapist”, John Worboys, and at least one of his victims was posh (now married to Boris Johnson, no less), so when they are girls from troubled families or council estates, the response can be expected to be at least as bad. West Yorkshire detectives stubbornly refused to believe that the Yorkshire Ripper was a Yorkshireman, having heard a north-easterner boast of the crimes on tape, despite several of his victims telling them so. There is nothing for the police in his set of ‘recommendations’; no challenge to police sexism or misogyny (or classism). Cases of serving police officers abusing their partners and spouses and others backing them up, or committing sexual crimes and getting away with it for some time are legion. I guess a MacPherson report for women would be too woke; wouldn’t want to hurt the police’s precious morale, would we?

There was a time when the existence of grooming gangs were widely doubted, that they were believed to be a figment of propaganda. We now know the gangs themselves were real, but this report absolutely is propaganda. It takes survivors’ stories and presents a pre-made analysis and recommendations that are standard right-wing talking points. This report is not a substitute for a proper public inquiry; that will have to take into account factors this report does not touch because its purpose will be to prevent further such abuses and to protect children both at home and in care, not to be racist enough to satisfy podcasters and the Reform/Restore media or to justify the policies of one political party.