Thousands of children are being 'groomed' for sex in England, the authorities warn. London Editor MARK HENNESSYreports
IN JANUARY Abid Mohammed Saddique and Mohammed Romaan Liaqat were given indefinite jail terms after they were found guilty of running “a reign of terror” by grooming vulnerable girls – some as young as 12 – for sex in Derby.
The court case brought the spotlight on to an issue that has disturbed child protection agencies for years, with some of them arguing that up to 10,000 children – one in 10 of whom are boys – are exploited in such ways.
The men before the court gave drink and drugs to 26 victims, whom they picked up late at night on the streets of the city, before taking them to remote areas where they raped them and then passed them on to friends to do the same.
Describing Saddique as “evil, manipulative and controlling”, Justice Philip Head told him: “You are in the truest sense a sexual predator with a voracious sexual appetite that you gratified as frequently as possible in a variety of ways.”
In a study, Bedfordshire University found that one in five of the victims that they had traced had been in foster homes, or local authority care when the exploitation happened, while a third of the total had gone missing 10 times or more.
But the true scale of the crisis is unknown, with the university reporting that three-quarters of all of England’s local safeguarding and child protection boards do not keep figures on the numbers of exploitation cases coming before them.
However, a snapshot survey carried out on just one day found that 1,000 children in just 33 of the 144 local authority districts in England were being abused, while those in local authority care were more than four times more likely to be exploited than those living with parents.
The Derby case and others like it led the former Labour justice secretary Jack Straw to break political convention in the UK, when he charged that some Pakistani men preyed on young white girls because they were “easy meat” for sex.
Now, the Office of Children’s Commissioner in England has ordered a two-year inquiry, though its deputy head, Sue Berelowitz, is already clear about the scale of the crisis: “Right now thousands of children are being horrifically abused by gangs,” she said.
Ms Berelowitz does not see sex-grooming as being just an issue for Muslim communities: “The emerging evidence is that the children and perpetrators involved are very diverse and seem to reflect the local demographic of where the abuse is taking place,” she said.
Mr Straw was criticised for ethnic stereotyping, though some have argued that he spoke truly in so far as young Asian males, particularly those in deprived areas, tend to look outside their own communities for sex, knowing that relations with an Asian girl could have disastrous consequences for them.
One victim, identified only as Emma, was flattered when she first came to the attention of an older male, who offered gifts, but, just as importantly, time, to a child deprived of much attention and care at home.
“They then started to get nasty with me, really nasty, it wasn’t fun anymore, it wasn’t nice. They had full control over me, they got very violent and threatening. I’d get raped once a week, every week. I’d have to sleep with other men as well,” she said.
Earlier this year, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre warned that local authorities in some parts of the UK were unaware of the scale of the problem in their areas, adding that most abuse never came to light.