Councils are often only persuaded to investigate local grooming gang scandals after “bad publicity,” a leading voice on child abuse has said.
Prof Alexis Jay, the chair of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, told the Home Affairs Select Committee that some councils did not want to become “another Rotherham.”
Speaking to the Home Affairs Select Committee, Jay said that her report into Rotherham, which was published in 2014 and found that at least 1,400 children had been abused by gangs of predominantly Pakistani men, took “a lot of persuasion that this was the right thing to do.”
Jay took questions from Robbie Moore, the Tory MP for Keighley and Ilkley, who asked Jay on how to ensure local inquiries are launched when local authorities resist them.
Referring to her report into Rotherham, she said: “That was non-statutory, it was not expensive, and it took 10 months.”
Moore said: “But that was with the will of Rotherham council to do that.”
But Prof Jay said: “It took a lot of persuasion that this was the right thing to do. Ultimately people are persuaded, as I’ve learned in this a lot, they’re generally persuaded by bad publicity.
“If they won’t do it because it’s the right thing to do, then sometimes bad publicity will set that.”
Giving evidence in parliament, she continued: “I have heard it said in other places … ‘we will not be another Rotherham.’ That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, we will not be, in other words there will be a kind of collusion not to commission such reports.”
She said: “I’m simply giving you a possible explanation … but I know that it has applied in other places, that by having an inquiry you may actually be causing the area to be represented in a way that’s not desirable.”
Her comments that local authorities struggling with grooming gangs abuse might not investigate unless there is “bad publicity” comes after the government rejected a national inquiry and promoted more local reviews.
John O’Brien, the Secretary to the Inquiry, said: “In the six areas that we looked at, two of them reported that they had not only no grooming gangs but almost no instances of organised child sexual abuse at all. But of course they did, they just didn’t record it.”
He added: “What was recorded was generic abuse, not sexual abuse.”
He continued: “If you go up and down the country, I have no doubt at all, you will find areas that have all sorts of grooming gangs, and there will be all sorts of ethnicity involved depending on the area you look at.
“But can you possibly quantify it because the data won’t support it? The areas we looked at, they looked us in the eye and said we don’t have any.”
He said that “data throughout the inquiry was the bane of our lives” and that getting accurate data was a “nightmare.”
Earlier in the hearing, Prof Jay said that the first response she received after publishing her inquiry in 2022 was positive, but worsened significantly in 2023.
She said that what she heard from Grant Shapps, Liz Truss’s home secretary, made her feel “much encouraged”.
But she said that the written response to her report in May 2023 was “awful.”
She told MPs: “It was awful. I cannot tell you how it felt to constantly read the response, when we got the final printed version of the government’s response.”
The response, written when Suella Braverman was home secretary, was described by Jay as “It “inconsequential, insubstantial, committed to nothing.”
She continued: “And the wording that was used very often amongst the 20 recommendations was ‘we accept the need for’ whatever it was, but made no specific commitment. The reaction of all of us, but mostly victims and survivors, was such huge disappointment and anger.”
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