Why I’m Creating a National Archive for the Survivors of Grooming Gangs

And How You Can Help

If Jess Philips thought she was being clever by rushing out a statement on Tuesday afternoon, just as Parliament was breaking for Easter, confirming that the five local inquiries into grooming gangs would not be going ahead, she got the surprise of her life.

Philip’s statement was seized upon by Katie Lam, who took the opportunity to deliver a blistering speech in Parliament highlighting the brutality of the abuse suffered by victims, and the actions taken by police and social services to facilitate it.

“The girls we are talking about are predominantly white. The men who preyed on them were predominantly Muslim, generally either from Pakistan or of Pakistani heritage. [...] How, without a national inquiry, can we understand what part those factors played?” Lam asked, continuing: “There is no question but that the state has failed these children time and again. [...] Why have Ministers refused to establish a dedicated unit in the National Crime Agency to investigate councilors and officials accused of collusion and corruption?”

The answer is simple and obvious: Labour cannot investigate the crimes of officials who facilitated the abuse, because they would be implicated themselves.

As Lam points out, “The ringleader of the Rochdale rape gang, Shabir Ahmed, was employed as a welfare rights officer by Oldham council,” – from 1988 to 2006 to be precise. Ahmed, who took bookings for his clients to rape trafficked children from behind his desk, was a Labour Party member. When he was arrested, the Labour Mayor of Oldham, Abdul Jabbar, wrote him a reference.

The Labour links don’t stop there. Our current Minister of State for Local Government and English Devolution, James McMahon, served as a councillor on Oldham council from 2003 to 2017. He was leader of that council from 2011 to 2016. Shabir was jailed for his role in the grooming gangs in May 2012; McMahon must have known then that the council had employed a man heavily implicated in the grooming gangs, yet it wasn’t until 2019, after McMahon had left the council, that an independent inquiry commissioned by Oldham Council was finally convened.

The report from that inquiry was released in 2022. According to Oldham campaigner Raja Miah, it was a whitewash. He describes multiple failings of the review, including that it interviewed just one survivor, following pressure by Maggie Oliver, whom Oldham’s Director of Children's Services tried to silence; the researchers only took limited notes of testimonies, and multiple witnesses refused to sign off on their testimonies due to inaccuracies; the review also only covered a limited time frame, and gave no figures for how many survivors there were in Oldham. That didn’t stop McMahon praising it, along with Angela Rayner, who is now deputy Prime Minister.

For all their current hay-making on the topic, the Conservatives are little better. The first Jay report, which found that 1,400 girls had been raped in Rotherham while police and council officers turned a blind eye, was published in 2014 under a Tory government. Their response was to do nothing.

To date there have been ten inquiries and reports into the grooming gangs, in Rotherham, Oxford, Oldham and Telford, all of which found that council and police officers ignored the rape of thousands of victims by predominantly Pakistani men. To date, not a single official has been held accountable.

At this point, an inquiry won’t cut it. Inquiries, by their nature, are limited in their scope. They interview only the key witnesses and confine themselves to a particular time frame, in order to assess the material and produce a report as quickly as possible. They provide the public with statistics — 1,400 raped in Rotherham, another 1,000 in Telford — but numbers in this context are meaningless and easily ignored. The numbers alone simply don’t give the public a clear picture of what really took place. They don’t help build an understanding of the atrocity that has occurred within our midst. Only testimonies, like the one read out by Lam on Tuesday, can do that.

Yet the testimonies given in legal proceedings, like court cases and inquiries, are easily hidden. On Saturday, news broke that a judge in Bradford had blocked the release of court transcripts from the 2016 trial of twelve men found guilty of raping a girl from Keighley. The transcripts had been requested by Open Justice UK, which crowd-funds the money required (the courts charge thousands of pounds to release the transcripts; even then, they are released only after approval by a judge on a case-by-case basis). Judge Jonathan Rose blocked the application, saying that “in the context of the public debate now taking place in general concerning cases such as this [releasing the transcripts] “would in my view be contrary to the public interest.”

The Public Need to Know

I was born in 1981. For almost my entire lifetime, it has been possible to believe that we Brits lived in a decent, high-trust, civilised society. Yes, there has always been crime, of course. We were all aware that dark things sometimes went on behind closed doors. But the prevailing image of ourselves as a nation was that, overall, Britain was a safe place to live full of decent people who knew wrong from right. We could donate to Band Aid or Children In Need, bang pots for the NHS, place a ‘Refugees Welcome’ poster in our windows, and feel good about ourselves. It was always a false image. The early 1980s is roughly when the gangs first started grooming and trafficking children. This has been taking place for my entire lifetime and continues today.

In the last year or so that image has already started to crumble, largely because a stroll down almost any high street, past the multitude of nail bars, vape shops and empty Turkish Barbers, now reveals the stark reality: Britain’s economy has been hollowed out, replaced by criminal gangs who use slave labour to get rich. As that old image crumbles, one can already feel the tension mounting.

The grooming gangs blow the old narrative apart. That image we had of ourselves as a fundamentally decent, largely safe nation was a mirage, as in our midst was an evil of enormous magnitude. There may be as many as a million survivors of these gangs — boys, as well as girls, who so far have never received a mention at all in any of this. Their rape, enslavement and trafficking happened right under our noses and none of us did a thing to stop it. I include myself in that accusation. I first knew about the gangs when the Jay report was published back in 2014; have I spent every day since campaigning for justice for the victims? I can’t say that I have.

But in order to exorcise evil on this scale, we must first look it fully in the face. The British people don’t need another report full of stats and figures and a few select testimonies hinting at what took place. We need to know everything. We need to hear the stories of each and every survivor, to fully face up to what we’d previously ignored. And then we need to find a way to collectively reckon with what happened.

• Every council officer whose job it was to protect children, and who failed, needs to be held to account.

• Every police officer who told a parent that their daughter had opted for prostitution as a lifestyle choice in her early teens, needs to be held to account.

• Every official who took a bribe to look the other way must be jailed.

• Every politician who covered up the abuse in order to secure the support of the Muslim bloc, must be made to pay reparations.

In order for that to happen, every single survivor must be interviewed, their testimony made public in video and print format (anonymised in most cases). We need exhibitions around the country telling those stories, so that the British people can finally understand what took place and how it was allowed to happen. We need to educate the next generation so that it never happens again. And finally, we need memorials to those whose lives were lost, to remember them, and to start to heal as a nation.

That is why I am launching the National Archive of the Survivors of Grooming Gangs.

Our mission will be to record the testimony of every single survivor we can find, and make that testimony public. In due course, we also hope to use that information to secure prosecutions of those responsible.

The work will take place in three phases.

Phase 1: Gathering Testimonies

The recordings will be uploaded to a dedicated website, in a format that makes it easy for the public and researchers to access the archives. Transcriptions will also be provided and indexed.

This work will be done in conjunction with therapists who will be on hand to support the survivors through the process, and lawyers who can advise on how to release the information without jeopardising any future legal proceedings.

Although we hope to get much of this work done in the two to three years, we will continue to record testimonies from survivors and secondary survivors (children and family members) for as long as there are those who have not yet told their story.

Phase 2: Moving Forward

In order to properly move forward we need justice for the survivors. We also need to support them with high-quality therapy so that they can rebuild their lives. For that reason there will be two streams of work in phase 2:

Legal: We will use the testimonies gathered to lean on the CPS to bring prosecutions, or to bring private prosecutions if required, of all officials who facilitated the gangs.

Therapeutic: We will crowd-fund high quality, long-term therapy for the survivors, who at the moment are given nothing more than a few hours of NHS therapy. We will also offer the same support for children born to survivors as a result of rape.

We intend to launch phase two no later than a year after the launch of phase one.

Phase 3: Legacy

In the longer term, the archive will be housed in a physical building open to all. We would make the full archive available to researchers who want to better understand this chapter of Britain's history. We also hope to fund a dedicated Centre of Excellence for therapeutic support for survivors of long term sexual abuse.

Support Us!

A website is already under way, and we have a videographer ready and waiting to record testimonies.

We are looking for qualified lawyers and therapists to help us with phase one, to ensure we get this project absolutely right. If you would like to be involved, please email me at DonnaRachel@proton.me.

I have also set up a GoFundMe to start to raise the funds required. Although at this stage those involved have offered to take part on a voluntary basis, the idea is that it will quickly grow into a long-term project. As a result, we will be looking to pay everyone a fair wage for their time. We’ll also need funding for associated costs, like equipment, web-hosting and so on. I have set the target purposefully low; ultimately, if done properly the project will costs in the millions of pounds, but at this stage we will work to whatever budget the public provide us with. If you would like to contribute, click here.

And finally, one of the most important ways to help is to simply spread the word. To do that, please share this article. Thank you.