January 4, 2023 - 10:00am

GB News broke a remarkable story this week as part of their ongoing investigation into UK grooming gangs — an issue that may not be occupying the headlines as much as it once did, but which has certainly not gone away. 

Mahroof Hussain is a former Labour Party politician who was forced to resign from his cabinet position at Rotherham Council in 2015 after the Casey Report named him as one of the figures who had “suppressed discussion” of grooming gangs operating in the town. 

And yet, despite his disgrace, it is reported that Hussein has succeeded in reinventing himself as an anti-Islamophobia activist, working with groups including Tell MAMA and Faith Matters. And, in an extraordinary example of failing upwards, in October 2020 Hussain was appointed as the NHS Health Education England Regional Diversity & Inclusion Manager for the Midlands. In September 2022, he was promoted to become the national lead.

This follows further reporting last month which revealed that Dominic Beck had been selected as Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Rother Valley, despite the fact that he also served on the Rotherham Council cabinet, alongside Hussain, and was also forced to resign following the Casey Report. Beck stood down following the investigation.

These two men were both implicated in the cover-up of the largest sex abuse scandal of this century, and possibly also of the last century. The number of victims in Rotherham alone dwarfs the number of victims abused by Jimmy Savile, and it is believed that across the UK it is “highly likely that the number of victims stretches into the tens of thousands.” The scale of this scandal is almost certainly far larger than we know, given how little investigation there has been, and how few consequences have been visited upon those involved.

I suspect that future historians will be puzzled by these last few decades, during which the widespread prostitution of children by organised criminal gangs — sometimes escalating to murder — was met with embarrassed silence in much of the media and among most feminists. This was even while far less serious incidents (say, Jeremy Clarkson’s comments about Meghan Markle) were met with outrage. Why would feminists jump to the defence of a princess, but raise barely a peep in response to the raped 11-year-old branded with the initial of her rapist? 

One reason, among several, was a fear of appearing racist. As former Greater Manchester Police constable turned whistleblower Maggie Oliver writes bluntly of the scandal in Rochdale, “the people at the top perceived the ethnicity of the offenders and the low status of poor white girls as a toxic mix.” As this scandal has unfolded over the last twenty years, most of those in positions of power (including many feminists) have cared far too little about the victims and far too much about their own reputations.

Which is why there is yet to be a true reckoning. Of the dozens of towns and cities targeted by these gangs, in only one — Rotherham — has an investigation been carried out by the National Crime Agency (NCA), the body best suited to independent investigations of this magnitude. While the Casey Report concluded in 2015 that, at a “conservative estimate”, 1,400 girls were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, the NCA’s subsequent investigation revised the number of victims during this period up to 1,510. As part of the NCA’s Operation Stovewood, 209 people have so far been arrested, with 20 convicted. 

During his leadership tilt last summer, Rishi Sunak promised that as Prime Minister he would “hunt down grooming gangs.” As his campaign website detailed:  

Rishi will set up a new emergency taskforce working at the heart of the National Crime Agency to launch an investigation into any town or city where significant grooming gang activity has been found and root it out.
- Ready for Rishi

The examples of Mahroof Hussain and Dominic Beck show us that the time is now for the Prime Minister to act on this promise.


Louise Perry is a freelance writer and campaigner against sexual violence.

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