Britain’s National Crime Agency said this week that it will review over a thousand cases allegedly involving grooming gangs that, in at least some instances, appear to have been dropped as a result of “human error” by police or prosecutors.
The NCA — Britain’s equivalent of the American FBI — said that Operation Beaconport will focus on “putting victims and survivors at the heart of the criminal justice process” by re-examining potential grooming gang investigations in England and Wales that were “incorrectly closed with no further action taken.”
The law enforcement agency said that it has so far identified 1,273 cases of potential grooming gang crimes that were either dropped by police forces or prosecutors, including 236 cases involving allegations of rape. The NCA stated that the identified cases spanned from the start of 2010 to March 31 of this year, meaning the vast majority would have taken place during the era in which the existence of grooming gangs was widespread public knowledge.
In a statement reported by the Times of London, NCA deputy director Nigel Leary said: “Our initial reviews have identified that in some cases where there has been a decision to take no further action [NFA] there were available lines of inquiry that could have been pursued.
“We’ve seen in those cases what appears to be potentially human error and … in some cases that those investigations haven’t followed what we would characterise as proper investigative practice, and that will have contributed to the NFA decision.”
Numerous reports have found that victims of predominantly Pakistani Muslim child rape grooming gangs, who were primarily young white working-class girls, were frequently ignored by local authorities, including police and social services, who often branded the victims as “prostitutes” despite them being children and in no position to consent to sex.
It is already well known that the perpetrators themselves were also often overlooked by authorities, who feared appearing racist or stoking community tensions, given the prevalence of Pakistani men within the child rape gangs.
In a change of tack, the National Crime Agency said that Operation Beaconport will record the ethnicities of both the suspected grooming gang offenders and their victims.
A report published earlier this year from Baroness Louise Casey found that over the past decade or more, there had been an “appalling lack of data on ethnicity” and that the issue of ethnicity had been “asked but dodged for years”.
“Child sexual exploitation is horrendous, whoever commits it, but there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination,” she said.
Baroness Casey even revealed that she discovered a child victim’s file in which someone had used Tipex [Whiteout] to obscure the word “Pakistani”.
The Casey report marked a turning point this year, forcing the government to finally launch a national inquiry into the sexual exploitation carried out by grooming gangs and the failures of local authorities to protect young girls. This reversed months of refusals from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who previously accused those calling for an inquiry of “jumping on the bandwagon of the far-right” and of spreading “misinformation”.
Operation Beaconport, as with the national inquiry, may prove embarrassing for the governing Labour Party, given that the party controlled many of the local governments in the areas of the country in which infamous grooming gangs operated. Operation Beaconport may also prove politically perilous for the prime minister himself, as some of the reopened cases were shut down when Starmer was serving as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service.
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