There is a phrase people use after every child protection scandal. It is meant to sound grave, reflective, a little managerial: “lessons must be learned.” The trouble is that Britain has been learning these lessons for so long that one begins to suspect the pupil is deliberately not listening.
Rupert Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry does not really tell us that the country knew nothing. That would almost be easier to bear. It tells us the worse thing: that a great deal was known, said, recorded, whispered, reported, referred, filed and then left to rot in the cupboard marked “difficult”.
This is why I find the official tone around grooming gangs so hard to stomach. The government says it wants answers. The previous government said the same. Councils said it. Police forces said it. Safeguarding boards said it. You could stack the reports on a desk and the desk would give way before the excuses did.
I have my own small, ugly piece of this history.
In 2007 I was 14. I knew a girl, aged 13, who was living in a private care home in Somerset. I am not going to name her, the home, or anyone else involved. She is dead now. That ought to be reason enough for restraint. But anonymity should not mean silence.
She was being groomed in Taunton. That was not my clever adult interpretation years later, applied retrospectively after reading inquiry reports and newspaper investigations. It was obvious enough to frighten a 14-year-old boy at the time.
The home was being used by Somerset social services, then under a Liberal Democrat-controlled county council. I mention it because power should not be allowed to dissolve into a mist called “the system”. Somebody is always in charge. Somebody signs contracts. Somebody chairs committees. Somebody receives warnings. Somebody decides that the existing arrangements are good enough.
I raised concerns. I was told I was a liar. Worse followed, because that is often what happens when the wrong sort of person tells the truth too early.
There was also, as I remember it, a psychologist who worked with the girl. He knew. She had told him enough for him to understand the danger. On one occasion he came to the home and she was leaving to meet the men in town. The staff, I was told, said they had to let her go. The psychologist stood in front of the door.
That image has never left me. An educated man, a professional, reduced to physically blocking an exit because the care system around the child had become feeble at exactly the moment it needed to be muscular. There is something almost Victorian about it, except that the Victorian instinct might have been clearer. A child is walking into danger. Stop her.
He did not succeed. How could he? One man in a doorway is not a safeguarding strategy. It is the last pathetic substitute for one.
She lived into adulthood, if that is the right word for what followed. In 2020, aged 26, she took her own life.
There will be people who dislike that sentence. They will say it is emotive. They will say one cannot draw a straight line between what happened to a child at 13 and the manner of her death thirteen years later. Strictly, clinically, they may be right. Human life is messy. Trauma does not fill in forms properly. But it is also a grotesque evasion to pretend that these childhood experiences simply end when the file is closed.
This is one of the great cheats in public life. Institutions deal in episodes. Victims live in aftermaths.
The official evidence is bad enough without my memory being added to it. Alexis Jay’s report into Rotherham estimated that around 1,400 children had been exploited between 1997 and 2013. Rotherham was not a failure of hindsight. People had been warning for years. Those warnings were disbelieved, minimised, or treated as politically inconvenient.
Telford brought its own horrors. Oxford, Rochdale, Oldham and other towns added more. Each place has its own local texture, its own cast of officials, its own archive of meetings and missed chances. Yet the moral shape is familiar. Children go missing. Adults know where they are going. Men are known by reputation, sometimes by name. A girl comes back distressed, drunk, frightened, injured, ashamed, defiant, silent, or all of these at once. The adults then spend far too long debating the child’s behaviour and far too little time pursuing the men.
The child is recast as the problem. That was the trick.
The language helped. “Risky behaviour.” “Lifestyle choice.” “Absconding.” “Difficult to engage.” “Promiscuous.” “Streetwise.” These are dreadful little phrases. They look neutral in a case note. In practice, they can amount to an alibi for cowardice. Once a child is described as troublesome, the adult men around her start to disappear from the official imagination.
Baroness Casey’s recent audit was particularly useful on one point. Grooming gangs, for all the years of public argument about them, are still not properly captured in a clear official dataset. That is astonishing. Imagine a scandal discussed for well over a decade, serious enough to bring down council leaders and police careers, and yet still elusive in the state’s own categories.
It is not merely a technical failure. Bad data is a political convenience. If nobody can count the thing properly, everybody can argue forever about whether the thing is exaggerated, misunderstood or old news. The child disappears into the spreadsheet gap.
The national inquiry into child sexual abuse also showed how children in care sit in a particularly exposed position. That should hardly need saying. Children in care are, by definition, children for whom the state has taken on parental responsibility. That responsibility cannot end at the front door of a children’s home. If a 13-year-old repeatedly leaves a placement to meet adult men, the question is not whether the staff are technically permitted to lock the door. The question is what emergency action follows from the knowledge that she is being drawn into danger.
Too often, the answer seems to have been: not enough, not fast enough, and not with any real appetite for confrontation.
Somerset has its own record here, and it is not comfortable reading. Ofsted’s 2015 inspection of Somerset children’s services described a “corporate failure to keep children safe”. It said services to protect children at risk of sexual exploitation were underdeveloped, that the scale of the problem was not properly understood, that missing children were not always followed up properly, that children were not seen often enough by social workers, and that cases were closed too soon.
Read that again with a real child in mind. Not a policy category. Not “a vulnerable young person”. A girl with a bag, a phone, a door, a man waiting somewhere in town, and a staff member saying there is nothing they can do.
What irritates me most is the modern habit of making safeguarding sound sophisticated while stripping it of common sense. There are conferences, pathways, thresholds, partnerships, toolkits, audits, protocols and diagrams. Some of that is necessary, of course. Nobody sensible wants child protection run on instinct alone. But paperwork can become a sedative. It makes officials feel that something has happened when the child herself remains exactly where she was: unsafe.
In the end, safeguarding has to include the unfashionable business of judgement. It has to include adults saying no. It has to include institutions backing the person who raises the alarm, rather than isolating him. It has to include a willingness to offend the sensibilities of other departments, other agencies, local politicians, community leaders and anyone else who would rather a scandal stayed quiet until after the next meeting.
The state is not short of power when it wants power. It can pursue a parent over school attendance. It can monitor speech. It can remove children from homes. It can regulate, inspect, licence and prosecute. Yet in these cases, faced with organised adult predation around vulnerable children, it often became shy.
That shyness ruined lives.
The political class now has a choice. It can treat Lowe’s report as another object in the culture war, to be praised or dismissed according to tribe. Or it can admit that the report sits in a much longer pile of evidence showing that Britain’s child protection machinery has repeatedly failed children who were already known to it.
No inquiry should be treated as scripture. Lowe’s is not a statutory inquiry and does not have the powers of one. Some claims will need testing. Some recommendations will be argued over. Fine. Argue. Test. Check. That is what serious government is for.
But do not pretend that the basic problem is mysterious.
When children in care are repeatedly missing, there should be an automatic external review. When adults are known to be collecting children from placements, police action should follow as a matter of urgency. When professionals raise concerns, they should be protected rather than managed. When children’s services fail, senior people should not be allowed to glide into retirement, consultancy or another well-paid post as though nothing of consequence happened on their watch.
And data, for heaven’s sake, should be honest. Record the age of victims, care status, missing episodes, school warnings, taxi links, offender ethnicity, nationality where relevant, and prior agency contact. Record it nationally. Publish enough of it to let the public see what is being done. The public is not stupid. It becomes suspicious when basic facts are treated as contraband.
I keep coming back to that doorway in Taunton. Perhaps because it is easier to understand than a thousand pages of reports. A child was leaving. A man tried to stop her. Around them stood the invisible architecture of the state: contracts, councils, care plans, inspections, minutes, duties, policies.
It was not enough.
Years later, she was gone. And the people now in power know enough to act. They have known enough for years.
The question is whether they will finally stand in the doorway, or whether they will commission another report about why nobody did.
