The grooming gangs inquiry must confront our dehumanisation of working class girls

Too often, institutions refuse to see teenage girls as children worth protecting.

Photo by Anastasiya Badun on Unsplash

Whenever grooming gangs dominate the news cycle, it’s not just the cases in the headlines that come to mind. With a heavy heart, I think of every teenage girl in this country who’s been exploited, ignored, or blamed, and how little has changed.

Yesterday’s report by Baroness Casey sheds new light on how, in these specific cases, victims were failed, notably because local authorities were reluctant to confront the ethnicity of the perpetrators.

That matters. As Casey points out, pretending otherwise “does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.” But while many media outlets focus on that fact today, a bigger part of the story is being ignored.

Across the country, women and girls who’ve suffered violence – from a peer, a family member, a boyfriend or a stranger – will tell you how often the criminal justice system failed to see them, how it stripped them of dignity and how it made their suffering feel like their fault.

Baroness Casey

The victims in these grooming scandals were subjected to the most extreme, most damning version of that dynamic. Many were poor, vulnerable, and already let down by the state. Some came from homes full of neglect; others were bounced between foster placements or social workers. Some were labelled “troubled”, a word that, in the absence of a loving adult to protect them, became a reason for professionals to give up on them entirely.

Teachers, social workers, police officers, the very people meant to cradle children through difficulty, didn’t see these girls as children at all. They were seen as young women with misguided agency, as though they somehow ‘chose’ rape, slavery, and abuse in exchange for a bottle of vodka or a ride in a car. The ignorance, misogyny and classism that allowed this thinking to take hold are sickening. But we should not fool ourselves that these attitudes exist in a vacuum.

I went to a girls’ school in West Yorkshire in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The majority of students came from stable, middle-class families. In theory, we were the girls who had every protection. In practice, grooming was everywhere.

Men in their twenties would pull up outside school gates at lunchtime, collecting 13-year-old girls and dropping them off before break ended. Sixth-form boys would solicit nude photos from girls several years their junior with empty promises of affection, only to distribute them among friends. Grown men would approach girls on Facebook, meet them in shadowy parks, ply them with alcohol — and who knows what else — leaving them vulnerable and ashamed.

These stories haunted the corridors, passed from girl to girl, laced with silence and shame. Teachers heard them. Some suspected. But too often, they turned away, or worse, they blamed the girls.

If this was happening to us, girls who were comparatively well-resourced and supported, it’s horrifying to imagine the experiences of the girls who were failed most catastrophically by the system, many of whom were in care, marginalised, or living in poverty.

I hope things have improved in schools since then. But misogyny still shapes the way our society understands teenage girlhood. Just look at the conversations around social media, where concerns about online exploitation are too often brushed aside with vague complaints about narcissism or screen addiction, while tech platforms continue to profit from unsafe, unsupervised digital spaces. In fact, Casey notes that online sexual abuse now accounts for the largest proportion – 40 per cent – of all recorded sexual abuse crime.

Being a woman can be lonely and frightening. Being a teenage girl can be terrifying. You exist somewhere between childhood and adulthood, where your growing autonomy evokes contempt and your naivety invites blame.

“We need to see children as children,” Casey writes. But when it comes to teenage girls, especially those from poorer backgrounds, that simple principle too often falls away. Misogyny, compounded by racism or class prejudice, overrides our ability to see girls as vulnerable. Instead, their abuse is treated like something they opted into and a reputation they earned.

I welcome the announcement of a new statutory inquiry. The victims deserve justice. But I sincerely hope this inquiry doesn’t allow the far right to dominate the conversation, reducing it to one about race and immigration alone. Not only is that narrative incomplete – after all, recent estimates suggest around 85 per cent of group-based child abusers in the UK are white – it also lets the far right off the hook for its own entrenched misogyny. I’ve written extensively about that very fact.

Instead, the inquiry must put front and centre the deeper, longer-standing problem: the dehumanisation of working-class girls, and a criminal justice system that too often sees teenage victims not as children to be protected, but as problems to be managed.

I hope the inquiry explores the devastating link between poverty and sexual violence. I hope it makes us re-examine our attitudes towards teenagers. I hope it leads to trauma-informed reform in our schools, police forces, and social services, where dignity, care and belief are the default response to disclosure. And I hope it finally prompts action on long-standing recommendations, including mandatory reporting by professionals when a child is suspected of being sexually abused.

This should be a reckoning not just with what happened in Rotherham, Rochdale or Bradford, but with how our society continues to treat teenage girls.■

About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster. She has worked in and around Westminster for five years, starting her career as a parliamentary clerk before throwing away the wig and entering journalism. Zoë then worked as a policy and politics reporter at the New Statesman, before joining the Independent as a political correspondent. When not writing about politics and policy, she is a regular commentator on TV and radio and a panellist on the Oh God What Now podcast.

This piece is part of The Lead Says, bringing you insightful writing on people, place and policy. This is not the first time we at The Lead have written about grooming gangs. In January, we debunked some of the most outrageous and dangerous claims being made about grooming gangs from characters like Elon Musk and Nigel Farage. Last year, Katherine Quarmby visited Rochdale and Rotherham to speak to victims of abuse and investigate how the towns cope the legacy of abuse. Consider a paid subscription to help us continue our reporting on grooming gangs, hidden abuse, and the narratives being adopted by the far right in the UK.