TRIGGERnometry - The UNCENSORED Truth About Grooming Gangs - Charlie Peters

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Charlie Peters is a National Reporter for GBNews and part of the broadcaster's investigative wing. He has long been investigating the Grooming Gangs scandal, whilst also providing on the ground coverage from towns and cities across the country. Follow Charlie's work: X - https://x.com/CDP1882 GBNews Documentary - https://youtu.be/VAGk2mvgBEk?si=jgMsgvy5LNoJ6OAQ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 13:07 An Estimate Of The Number Of Victims 15:41 The Children Being From Poor And Underprivileged Backgrounds 19:03 How Much Of This Is Systemic? 26:14 The Demographics Of The Perpetrators And The Victims 31:25 Where Does The Lack Of Shame Come From? 38:46 Criminal Gangs And Grooming Gangs 43:03 Foreign Nationals Who Can't Be Deported 53:49 The State Prioritises The Human Rights Of The Perpetrators Over Victims 57:10 Elon Musk's Intervention 01:03:26 Optimism For A National Enquiry 01:07:47 I Know Of Areas That Would Dwarf Rotherham 01:13:56 If You Care About The Grooming Gangs You Are Far-Right 01:23:046 The Damning Statistics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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they've outlasted every crisis in history. Visit NobleGoldinvestments.com and get your free wealth protection kit today. That's NobleGoldinvestments.com for your free wealth protection kit. Discover how simple it is to protect your future. Past performance may not be indicative of future results investing in precious metals, including gold involved risks. Consult with a tax attorney or financial professional before making an investment. position. Fifty different towns and cities, they deliberately chose to look at those places where none of this had happened. They felt it more appropriate in this case to look forward and not look back. I think it was a deliberate choice to cover up the crisis. It is the most horrendous abuse

you can possibly describe. Girls were set on fire. Girls endured fake executions, real executions. In some of these places, there was active collusion between police officers, drug gangs and child abuses from the police to protect the facilitation of child abuse and drug gangs because they're getting a bit on the side. Not just drugs, but girls as well. Charlie, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you very much for having me. You've been doing amazing coverage for a very long time, actually, on the grooming gangs, so-called. We'll get into all of the language and all of that. But the first thing we actually wanted to do is I think we all recognize that a lot of people have, thank God, come across this issue in the last month. And a lot of people don't really know much

about it. So we wanted to ask you as someone who's done a lot of investigations into this, first and foremost, just to tell people what are grooming gangs, how long have they been going on, how many people have been affected, you know, the numbers, the details, etc. So grooming gangs is a short, slangy term to refer to group localized child sexual exploitation. It is a group-based form of child abuse. And there have been reports of this in various formats for forever, frankly. Groups have always gotten together to abuse children.

But in Britain, there is a particular form of GLCSE, as it's known in the literature, as it were, which originated from the early 1960s, which is the first time we have records of this form of child abuse going on. And that is by predominantly South Asian, in particular, Pakistani,

Kashmiri, Mirpuri, offenders targeting predominantly white working class girls, particularly in northern former mill towns, such as, say, Rotherham, on Bradford, Huddersfield, and other parts of the country in the West Midlands as well, such as in Telford. Reports became a little bit more common than early 1970s, in particular from Rotherham, and then the trail kind of went silent in terms of reporting on this issue for quite a while until the early 2000s when a Labour MP in Keithley,

which is a part of West Yorkshire near Bradford, in the Bradford District, called Anne Cryer made a report that Pakistani men were targeting schoolgirls outside their school gates and luring them in, grooming them, making them believe that they were their boyfriends, that they had a positive, supportive relationship, and then quickly turning that boyfriend model of exploitation into an abusive one. When Anne Cryer raised these concerns, she was derided as a racist, and they were shut down, very effective.

by her own party. Senior figures, Labour Party apparatchiks basically came down on her like a ton of bricks and any effort that she might have made to expose this issue was pretty much extinguished straight away. The trail went cold again as a consequence of that. I think many people who may have come to Anna Cry's defence saw the cultural and quite severe societal punishment she received for expressing these concerns and they shied away. It was a form of cultural censorship. And then about five or six years later, a journalist at the Times called Andrew Norfolk, who was based in the north of England at the time, where he was eventually Northern editor and chief correspondent, he was looking into these sorts of crimes.

And he has since writing about this said that the first time he made a report about the Grumling Gang scandal and in particular the difference between the predominant background of the offenders, that being South Asian and Pakistani in particular, and the over-representation of white girls in the victims, meant that he felt this was sort of a far-right fantasy. He thought that this story was so destructive, and he actually sort of left it alone. And then a few years after that, he said that he was driving

from where he was based in York, up to Edinburgh, for a weekend, just a nice weekend away from work. While he was doing so, he heard a BBC radio bulletin from Manchester Crown Court. And he heard about another one of these trials fitting the exact same pattern that he'd heard about Anne Cryer saying in the early 2000s,

which he himself had written about a few years prior. And then it sort of hit him, okay, what I missed a few years ago is actually a major, major crisis. And so he began researching court records, looking into other allegations he'd heard. What he found was a national crisis of the pattern of this son of abuse

that was first reported briefly in the 60s, again in the 70s, very much overtly by Anne Crier, taking place right across the country. But in order to expose the scandal more effectively and to show the extent of its horrors, he chose one town where the most information was coming from. That was Rotterham in South Yorkshire. It's a few miles away from Sheffield as part of that South Yorkshire

sort of unitary area. And working with whistleblowers in the town, including Sammy Woodhouse, a victim of one of these abuse gangs. and also Jane Senior, a then youth worker for a council-funded youth project called Risky Business. He collated information that would expose the extent of the crisis in the town. Over a number of years, he produced extremely compelling journalism. Some of the most first-rate investigations into group-based child abuse that, frankly, the world has ever seen.

It was severely impressive stuff, and it forced Rotherham to launch their own investigation. For two years, they derided his work as lies of the Murdoch press. They said this couldn't possibly be true. Can you imagine that? A reporter being told that your work is lies and slamming you as being, you know, a link to Murdoch because he owns News UK in the paper he runs. I can actually, lately. But it worked, his reporting work.

The bad publicity was so extensive and so severe that they couldn't ignore it. Launched a review, it was headed up by Professor Alexis J. And she found in this town, between 1997 and 2013, that at a conservative estimate, some 1,400 girls, predominantly girls, children in general, have been abused by these gangs over that period. Rotherham is a small town, but it doesn't have a force field around it. Girls were also being trafficked out of that area, and they were enduring some of the most horrific child abuse

that I think has ever been recorded in this country. And details of the J-Report are stomach churning. They are awful. but it wasn't just the fact that the perpetrators were conducting this appalling abuse is that it was being actively ignored by those who were meant to investigate this stuff. Social workers looked the other way. Senior elected politicians in the area chilled discussions about this. They prioritise community cohesion over justice for girls who were being abused by predominantly Pakistani men.

And police officers who are duty-bound to investigate this sort of appalling abuse, were either totally failing to deal with it in any way because they had a sexist view of the girls and a frankly racist view of how communication should work or they just, well, in some cases, they were sort of colluding in it themselves, right? That's what was going on in Rotherham. What Andrew Norfolk exposed in that town

and what that report showed, many people think it was just isolated to Rotherham. And in the years since, and what I got involved is, I was 18 years old when the J report came out, and I had a really lovely upbringing. I was raised in Surrey and Hampshire. Nothing really bad ever happened in my childhood.

I was enormously lucky. My vision of England was one of Fields and Hedros and the Royal Opera House and Ascot. I'm really lucky. But my vision of England was ripped from my heart when I read the J-Report. I tried to put myself in the shoes of those children and thinking, what must it be like to be taken from a children's home or to have a police officer see you being abused and for them to do nothing?

It completely defiled what I understood about Britain in general and England in particular being a place of liberty and protection from the state. And it kind of crushed me in a way. And got into journalism quite soon after and while I was studying university, I always came back to this issue, gathered a lot of personal research

that I gathered over the years. And as soon as I graduated, I got stuck into this crisis. Because I wanted to show that beyond just a handful of local areas that had been discovered already, and what Andrew Norfolk did in Rotherham, others from the Sunday Mirror did in Telford, which also found thousands of victims over a similar period, I wanted to show it wasn't just those areas, that there were these reports happening all over the country. I wanted to join the dots and show this was a national problem. And so I pitched this idea of a proper investigation to GB News. By that point, I was in my mid-20s. I had a few bylines, I've done a few stories as a reporter.

Charlie, can I just pause you there? Because you did offer it to GB News. Right. Offer it a lot of places. You offered it to a lot of places. And what was the response when you offered it? Well, I don't know if anyone else had tried to make a documentary like this before. There'd been lots of courage in Rochdale, for example, Telford and Rodham,

but there'd never been a national effort. And when I tried to put this forward, and I had some pretty compelling stuff already, nobody was interested. Nobody was interested. An editor, I'm told firsthand from a source at the meeting, an editor at a major right-wing newspaper in this country said, we don't want a film about Muslims being made by a white man. That was the response to the pitch I'd already made, which included exclusive interviews with survivors, their families, which included revelations that had never been touched before. people being named in failures and cover-ups that had never been named before.

Real exposure of ongoing problems and people just could not give a toss. Could not give a toss. I don't think that's what happened at all. It's not that they couldn't give a toss. It sounds to me like they were very scared. Well, I don't know they can say. But I think actually for a lot of people that this is a problem they can overlook, they don't care. Really?

Yeah, I do think so. I think a lot of people literally do not care. for the same reason that a lot of these offices and local officials failed to investigate these girls because they had, and their concerns, because they had misogynistic views of them being part of the underclass, I think that feeling is still rife in the country today, especially in some of the leading media houses of Britain in London. When you think about the Me Too crisis erupting and everyone discussing a whole range of issues in our sexual politics and how men and women interact at no point during that sort of cultural reckoning. Did any of those people think, well, how can we turn this conversation into probably the greatest atrocity in this country since the Second World War, tens of thousands of girls being abused? So, yeah, I think they literally didn't care. Well, it's possible that they were scared as well, I'm sure. The reason I say it is we don't want a documentary about Muslims raping white girls or whatever the language was made by a white guy. That doesn't sound to me like people not caring.

That sounds to me like the demographics of the issue. are very, very inconvenient. Sure. But at the same time, they could have easily found someone else to make this film. They couldn't have easily done it. If they cared about it, they could have made it. There's no, like most scandals in this country, they're just on the surface. You don't have to be the greatest investigator ever to reveal this stuff. It's all there.

You just have to put in the work and go and meet these people. A lot of these documents are just lying in the open. They're all being recorded. Whistleblowers weren't hard to come across. You just say, I'm doing this and they come to you. The collection element of this investigation has been quite straightforward. These people have been crying out for years. I have no formal journalistic training.

I've just learned on the job. I've never made a documentary before I started making this one. I sort of just work with a mate to make it happen. So, yeah, we got some funding to take some time off and make it. And then we pitched the GB News with this idea. They were the only people who were interested in this story being told. And what we showed after two years of investigation was that this was a national crisis. We found over 50 different towns.

and cities that had been affected by this pattern of child abuse, looking through court records and compelling testimony from survivors all over the country, from places that other outlets are just kind of ignored forever. People from South Wales were speaking to us, people from the southwest of England, people just don't anticipate these places being as part of this conversation. They always thought, ah, this was just Rochdale and Greater Manchester, this was just Rotherham, this was just Telford. But actually, 50 different towns and cities, it's a national crisis of it's like that's never been reckoned with. And what's your best estimate of the number of victims?

I've always said tens of thousands, but the problem is that, you know, me and my friend who made this documentary with the Guy Dampier, we were just a two-man team looking into this. I've said tens of thousands because in the handful of areas that we've had proper investigations, they have found thousands of victims at a conservative estimate. So if we found 50 different towns and cities, that's really concerning. There's also never been a local review or a government review into Bradford, probably the town that would dwarf all others. Or Huddersfield where there have been so many trials, many of them only concluding in recent weeks because they take so long to doing it all linked. Because the number of perpetrators is so large.

You can't actually do them all in one trial. You have to do them over several trials over several years. So I do think tens of thousands is a conservative estimate. And every time this story breaks back into prominence, as it has done. probably for the most part ever in the last month, more survivors come forward. More people reach that moment of confidence that they can speak up.

And I think if there were a national inquiry, many more would come forward to. It's worth pointing out to our international viewers and listeners at Bradford and Huddersfield is cities and Rotterham is a town. So by population, they're going to be much larger, so potentially far more victims. One of the most heinous aspects of this crime

was how these perpetrators these criminals targeted the most vulnerable girls in society, which I find absolutely heartbreaking. I'd say to the first point, Oxford's a city. They found many, many perpetrators there. Several trials took place, but Rotherham still dwarfed it and Rotherham just the town. So the pattern that we have found to demonstrate that this is an issue, not really of the locality, it's more sort of who's in it. So during the Rotherham crisis from 97 to 2014, and we have very good evidence to believe it's ongoing, of course. The Pakistani population was no more than 2% of the town, and yet 1,400 girls, and well, mostly girls have been abused. Some boys were abused too. Some non-white girls were abused to. Sikh children were also part of this appalling scandal.

So the pattern's really clear, but the problem is the pattern completely flies in the face of what is acceptable. to discuss in terms of background and cultural motivators or ethnic motivators behind this sort of abuse. So that's why it's always been skirted over. Do you think part of the reason as well is a lot of these girls came from really underprivileged backgrounds? They were very vulnerable. They were in care homes. One girl you talked about who ended up being murdered was somebody who had a very, very low IQ. And so you look at, there's a part of the authorities that, like you say, nobody's going to miss these girls. You're speaking there about Laura Wilson, who was murdered in Rotherham.

So I have a good reason to believe that she wasn't actually groomed and that actually it was another member of her family who was, but there was a mix-up with the papers. But still, she was murdered by a Pakistani perpetrator, linked, I believe, to the grooming of a family member of hers. More will come out about that in due course. Just another example of how little there is that's really been done on this issue that so many more of these stories need to be told. But you're right, so many of the girls and indeed the boys targeted by these gangs are easy to get at because they slip to the net of the popular culture. Who do people really care about in this country? Frankly, white working class girls just aren't on that list. They're just not there.

They're not even close. Some of the children that were being abused are looked at as not just working class, but underclass, so below level of interest from the state, from charities, from the government and its allies. They just could not care less. And so that's part of the reason why it happened. But I do think that's an insufficient explanation because I know and they're not as prominent in the media coverage and there aren't so many of them who want to come forward, but I know plenty of middle-class victims of grooming gangs. And these are women now who are, you speak to me in private, but for then there's an additional cost of admitting to this, I think. They've told me this because they feel as

though their friends, by virtue of being middle class, would be even more likely to chastise them for saying, I've been targeted by Pakistani gangs when I was growing up, because that sort of language is additionally policed at that class level. You've got university education. You're talking about men raping you from, that can't possibly be an issue of, that's because they're men, not because they have any particular interest in you because they're Pakistani. So, so, yeah, I mean, I think the main problem here, the main issue, class is part of it, no doubt about it, huge part of it. But I do think that the ethnicity aspect has been more of a compelling driver behind this crime. And the fact of the matter is, there's never been

proper academic investigation or government-led investigation into this issue. This is surely one of the most fascinating areas for just study to work out why this particular background is so overrepresented in abusers, why these girls were targeted. Now, what is going on here? People should be, like, knocking down the doors of every academic funding outfit in Europe, right, for all the world, begging for cash for this. It's so interesting. The grim details beyond, it's fascinating to know why this has happened. Yeah. But there's nothing there. There's nothing there. Well, all, the, the most of the research I found is other stuff we've done ourselves. at GBM News or with my team, or as I said, which is two people. Or it's, you know, it's small

sources around the country coming together to bring information, which we've collated ourselves. Charlie, how much of the failing has been personal that we can pin on certain individuals and how much of it has been systemic? I think systemic. But there are guilty men and women in the country who've never been held to account. There's no doubt about that. And I think one of the reasons why we've seen this hesitancy for inquiries. really going on this month is because those people fear being named. So for background, we've had a few investigations into this, a few government investigations or government-sponsored investigations. As I said, we had that Rotherham one in 2014, had another one in Rotherham, a year later

called the Casey Review, led by Louise Casey, which found that the councillors in the town were essentially covering up the abuse, which led to all of them being sacked and replaced, but nobody really being held to account. No one ever being prosecuted for that negligence. no police officers were also punished in Rotherham. The strongest punishment from the independent of office of police conduct was a written warning after a seven-year-long review, longer than the Hillsborough investigation into misconduct by the police. We've also had that review in Telford, published in 2022.

Again, no punishment for anyone. And we've had a handful of local reports in Greater Manchester, commissioned by Andy Burnham, the mayor in Manchester. That was in Rochdale and in Oldham. But again, nobody ever held to account. And none of those inquiries have been statutory, which means nobody's been compelled to give evidence. All of those investigations have been launched essentially by the people

who are being investigated, which I think is not really a great way to go about investigation. I think it should be properly external. And obviously the people leading the investigation aren't linked to the councils themselves, but they've commissioned them themselves. It doesn't really fill me with a great amount of trust. I think that's part of the reason why no one's ever been held to account, because the people running these investigations have never compelled,

We also had a seven-year-long independent inquiry to child sexual abuse headed up by Professor Alexis J. The same academic and social worker who led the Rotherham-specific review in 2014 also led this national thing. Now, ICSA, as it was being called, looked at all forms of child abuse in the country. For many decades, it looked at the Jimmy Saville scandal, a former BBC presenter. It looked at the children's care home crisis in this country. It looked at the Catholic Church. It looked at all sorts of settings where abuse had gone on boarding schools, for example, state-sponsored boarding schools.

In all of those different mini-reports, IxA looked back. It looked back quite a while, and it gave thorough investigations. Thousands of people gave evidence. But the grooming gang scandal formed a subsection of a sub-report of ICSA on organised networks. They took hearings on this in, I think, 2020.

No, 2018, sorry, September of 2018. Two weeks long, not a single victim of the grooming gangs gave any evidence. Nobody was compelled to give evidence, and they chose six areas to look into this scandal. None of those areas fit the pattern analysis for this form of child abuse. Every single one of the six areas that Alexis J's team looked at had an under-representation of Pakistanis against the national average versus the 2011 census, which is the most recent data they had available. None of those areas had a major prosecution or a successful trial of these forms of gangs. At this point, dozens of prosecutions had taken place across the country.

There were certainly many towns to look at. For international listeners, they looked at Warwickshire, which, if you don't know, England, is, I suppose, like, northern Virginia in the United States. It's commutable to London. It's quite beautiful. It's quite rural. If you go a bit south, you've got sort of Richmond, Virginia, sort of that part of the neck of the woods. Really cozy. It's like Maryland, you know. There's not a lot there in terms of urban life, right?

They looked at St Helens in Merseyside. It was like 99% white. They looked at County Durham in the northeast, quaint part of England as well. They did not look at Bradford or Birmingham, where plenty of media reports had collated information demonstrating widespread forms of this abuse, but they deliberately chose to look at those places when none of this had happened.

Why? Well, on the opening day of the ICER inquiry, Henrietta Hill, QC, the lead council to the inquiry, the lawyer, said that they felt it more appropriate in this case to look forward and not look back.

In every single part of the ICSER inquiry, they looked back in all those other areas I discussed. But for grooming gangs, they thought it would be best to look forward and find out what's going

on other parts of the country. So they literally took evidence from an area where there was no data, which was in South Wales. A police officer came along and said, oh, we've got no data of grooming gangs here. As it transpired, there are a few grooming gangs in South Wales, as there are in all parts of the country. So that revealed that the police, even in areas where this is underreported, aren't doing a good job. But we know that in the areas where this is a major issue,

they're doing an even worse job, and they are failing to collect data, failing to adequately prosecute people, failing to get to the heart of his crisis. Now, since the ICSA report was published in 2022. It was published during my investigation into the grooming gangs for GUE News. None of it was useful. None of it was useful. It found nothing new. And so... Charlie, sorry, let me pause you there because I don't want to skip over this thing that you're saying. Because I haven't heard this before, and I've looked into this issue, clearly not deeply enough. But the fact that this report deliberately did not look at the areas which are known to be the sources of the problem, I'm not a conspiratorial. person remotely, very anti-conspiratorial, actually. But when you were telling us that,

my thinking is that cannot possibly be an accident. Oh, it's entirely deliberate. I've named it as being deliberate. I think it was a deliberate choice to cover up the crisis. It's a coverer. It was kicking the issue down the can, putting it away, put into long grass, somebody else will deal with that eventually. And so, as this debate has caught back up again, people keep saying, oh, we've already had an inquiry, the ICSA report. Right. Only a few politicians, Now are waking up to the fact that that was no inquiry. That was a sham. That was a cover-up. At the time, Andrew Norfolk, who was still working at the time as a reporter who exposed his scandal in Rotherham, he took quotes from survivors, campaigners, whistleblowers, etc. He'd met over the years. They described it as a cowardly reluctance to confront the issue. Nobody cared. It was an independent inquiry. There was no political power to force it. By this time, the independent inquiry had been through several different chairs, several different people heading it up. Alexis J was, Maybe the fifth chair to look into. It could have been the sixth.

I can't remember now there were so many. One of the previous chairs was a judge from New Zealand. They got rid of her in part because she was said to have noticed the pattern, the problem with people of, she described the Asian community, which in Britain usually refers to South Asians, such as those from Pakistan. So, I mean, they just didn't do it. They just did not do what they were meant to do.

To the organised network section of that inquiry, just glossed over the Grimmings entirely. So let's get into the issue that we keep circling around, which it seems to me is at the very core of all of this, which is the demographics of the perpetrators, the demographics of the survivors, the victims, and how that ties into the kind of world we've been living in and which these things matter a lot. You know, who the crime is committed by matters for some reason a lot, you know, instead of just the crime has been committed and used to be dealt with. So one of the concerns that a lot of people have had, and I think one of the reasons this issue has been under-discussed and undercovered in the media, is the fear of provoking bigotry towards a particular community, so to speak. And so the way people have talked about this is they try to broaden the conversation as much as possible, up to and including saying most offences are committed by white people and all of this other ridiculous stuff. But also, there are people who say, well, it's a Muslim problem, when it's absolutely not a Muslim problem, clearly, right? It's a problem with a very small subset of people from a very particular religious and geographical community, right?

So what do we know about the nature of the perpetrators? Where are they from and what is motivating their behavior? Sure. In the 1960s, Britain supported building a dam in Mirpur in northern Pakistan. it flooded lots of places and tens of thousands of immigrants from Pakistan moved to Britain predominantly to work in the textiles industry

in the mill towns in the north of England they settled in Bradford which still has a significant textiles industry in Leicester and in other parts of Yorkshire in the north as well with them they also brought their dependence they brought immediate family members and Mir Pugh

the part of Kashmir where many people came from as a district to northern Pakistan is very dissimilar to Northern Europe in terms of attitudes around marriage, family structure, gender, who has the power in a family, all the rest of it. One of the particular differences between the English nuclear family,

which I think is quite unique actually to this island, and the family structure of Kashmiris is cousin marriage. Cousin marriage is very common in Kashmir. and as a consequence it's now fairly common in England where many of these communities have settled. Cousin marriage creates clannishness. It creates a strange form of loyalty,

of honour and links between people where you feel a duty to protect and serve people where you wouldn't normally in this society. This created what we now call as community leaders in England, which refers to people elected via clans to represent them on their behalf when there are political issues going forward. This was vital for Pakistani mill workers in the 60s and 70s. When they needed representation in politics,

they would select from their clans. I think you can still see this in modern politics today. I think other people have adopted clannishness in this country. That clannishness tied in with extremely sexist views about women and extremely derogatory views about white women in particular in their lifestyles that may be separate to. girls from their South Asian heritage generates a really dangerous cocktail

that I think has generated this overrepresentation of this form of abuse. The reason why I think group-based offending is overrepresented so significantly among the British Pakistani community is because there isn't a great sense of shame when they do it. The reason why most offenders of child abuse in general

and this country are white is because they're mostly lone offenders. What they're doing, they know a shame and they do it by themselves. Most of it's online where there is grooming. It's often by one person. We've all seen those non-s-hunter sting videos. It's one bloke, pathetic creature,

being confronted by people in the street, on the path, wherever. It's very different with this community with Pakistanis. They do it together. There's no sort of why on earth are you grooming that 11-year-old girl at the school gates, giving her sweets and then alcohol and then drugs, compelling her into believing that she's your boyfriend and then becoming extremely violent and torturing her for years and ruining her life. They pass them around.

They trafficked them between different clans across the country. That is the crux of why that particular formal behaviour is going on. I think there may be some element of Islam that also affects them. But I think it's a tiny part in comparison to the broader issue of the clannishness. I mean, I've been in court cases where it's elements of Muslims referring to their faith as a reason why they might abuse or why they can't wear protection. In a sentencing in Rotherham in Sheffel, Crown Court in 2017, for example, two of the defendants shouted Allah Akbar as the judge handed down. I think it was a 12 and 15-year sentence to abuse his child rape for 12 years.

So, yes, that's why. So let's get into, sorry, France, I just want to clear the sub, because I know a lot of people watching will say to both of us, Well, no, actually, it's Muslims or whatever. What I meant when I said it's clearly not an Islam issue. I know what you mean. What I meant was if you go to central London and you walk around and, I know, you go to Harrods, it's full of Muslims, but they aren't doing grooming gangs. Sure.

I've never come across an Omani grooming gang in Britain, for example. That's what I'm saying, right? So it's clearly more specific than that. And what you talked about there, the clannishness, the cousin marriage, we've got a great discussion with Matthew Said, who's himself of a far Pakistani background coming up soon. and we talked about cousin marriage a lot with him. But what I want to get to is how do you get from clannishness?

And look, I'm from Eastern Europe. People are very, very kind of familial tribal. No cousin marriage, but nonetheless, the family, extended family is really important. And many, many people would rather give a job to the incompetent son-in-law than to somebody who's competent but isn't related to them, right? But how do you get from that clannishness to what you said, which is a lack of shame? Where does that lack of shame come from?

I think it's tied up in the additional element of the additional part of the cocktail that I refer to, which is the extremely negative views of the girls. They are referred to regularly in court transcripts and trials I've attended, survivors I've met. They'll always say we were referred to as fresh meat, as slags, as sluts, as worthy of the punishment. They don't actually see what they're doing as shameful because they think the girls deserve it. They dress in a certain way.

They got drunk. They met them at a park. Wow, well, they deserve it. It's mixing the clannishness with that particular attitude towards women in general, but really girls in particular that they're sort of going through this process of being, you know, you're 11,

your fair game now. You've hit puberty, therefore that's time to start. Because that's what it's like for many of these communities where they're from. It's quite common for girls that age to start being treated as a woman when they reach that maturity of being 11. Remarkable is to say that, but that's quite a consistent view. We've not confronted that as a society because the facts are too painful for a national project of multiculturalism, which sees individuals as interchangeable and everything's fine,

and you can just as easily integrate someone from mere pure as you can from Amsterdam. Everyone knows that not to be true in their hearts, but it's impossible to say it if you, you kind of prop up the regime on this issue. I've never felt like propping up that regime, in particular if it does lead to people covering up either actively or culturally what's going on here. But that's in effect what's happened. So I really do think the cultural attitude towards those girls inspired, I think, by racism. They look at white girls as being fair game because they are white. And that's not to say they don't abuse other girls. There are Sikh girls who are targeted as well. And I think that is some sort of ethno-religious attack. One of the great joys,

actually, of this investigation is being able to promote Sikh voices in this issue who've been ignored because it doesn't fit the narrative for other people, who would rather talk about this only as a white girl's issue, right? But this does actually affect other communities in a similar way. And also, other Pakistani girls were abused, often in the family setting. Many of the abuses that we know, for example, in Greater Manchester were attacking their own relatives. They're in one case while also going around and attacking white girls. There's one example I want to bring. It's truly horrendous, but it gets to the point of what I'm talking about honour and shame. There was a house in a part of Rochdale where one of the grooming gang abuses had a list on a door.

People could write their names on this list and they would tick next to their name whenever they'd visited. And inside this house, girls were kept on sordid mattresses and filthy squalid flats, and they were kept ready for sexual abuse. Girls in that building described being passed around like a bull around hordes of men who would turn up. At the end of the month, the man running that property would collect money from them based on the number of ticks they left. It's like a paedophile honesty box. That's clannishness. That is a high trust organisation.

I believe you to leave a tics when you go in there and attack a 12-year-old girl and the greater and the most appalling rays. And some of the abuse, I mean, I don't know what moderation you guys have on this, but I will just say, I mean, they were tortured, right? Girls were anally gang-raped, okay? It is the most horrendous abuse you can possibly describe. One girl in Oxford, for example, part of the Operation Bullfinch investigation from Thames Valley Police.

One girl had the initials of her abuser branded with a hot iron on the chief. branded on her, literally made to be property to an abuser. One girl was kept in a cage and told to bark like a dog. Girls were killed, girls were set on fire. Girls endured fake executions, real executions. Girls were abandoned in the moors in Greater Manchester, little to no clothing and told to make their way home. If you've been to the moors of Manchester, it's pretty brutal.

It's like arid. It's like English desert, left alone, wind-swept, austere. brutal, get home, knocking on the closest house you can get to crying in the street. And they were trafficked around the country. Bradford's never had an investigation, but I've not met many survivors who said they haven't been trafficked to Bradford, and I've met lots of survivors. You can't actually possibly describe just how bad this is in terms of the treatment they endured, but what they experienced was able to be delivered because of that high trust tick in the box

on a list. Charlie, and what percentage do we actually know were first generation immigrants and what percentage were people who came here in the 1960s and were maybe first, second, even third generation immigrants? Well, wouldn't it be lovely for me to have that data straight to hand because the government had collected it very effectively over the years and the home office had collected from the police departments who'd accurately recorded ethnicity and immigration status? I can't answer that properly because our government has completely failed to be transparent and to collect that information in the first place. What I can tell you, though, from my own experience of attending trials and for going through court transcripts, is that

a significant minority are older men from the Pakistani community, but the real horror is the fact that a lot of men have been conditioned into this abuse through a family structure. And what's particularly distressing about that is that you often see brothers being involved in the abuse, young men, 20s and 30s, being involved in this sort of abuse. There are people who've been on trial alongside their family members in this, for example. I've been to trials recently where there were men in their 60s and men in their 30s, all in the same dock. Some of them requiring Urdu interpreters, the older ones, often referred to locally by people as freshies, fresh off the boat, right?

But there's a range. There's a range. It's a multi-generational crisis. And as well, there's also the criminal gang element. For instance, you were talking about how there was a criminal gang that dealt drugs, and they had a grooming gang almost as a side hustle. In 2001, a home office researcher called Adele Weir went up to Rotherham to look into drug dealing there. The drug dealing was going on, but what she found really was a pattern of child abuse

and that these gangs were also running girls on the side. For a lot of them, it was just another form of criminality. The overlapping between organized criminality and child abuse, and trafficking was very similar for these communities in particular. And that's also added to the hesitation from survivors to be able to adequately speak up. I do think, I know other journalists have tried to prove this. I'm very convinced that in some of these places, there was active collusion between police officers, drug gangs and child abuses from the police to protect the facilitation

of child abuse and drug gangs because they're getting a bit on the side. Not just drugs, but girls as well. They were getting paid a little bit. And in your documentary, you talked about this as well. Yeah. Yeah. And there's more to come on this, all right? There's more to come on this. I'm chasing so many leads on this, but I think that's the next part of this scandal that's going to be exploded is the overlap between law enforcement and law breaking at the most heinous level. It will have to come out at some point. because just in the last month or so,

we've heard another report from the IOPC, which is the police watchdog. They investigate police officers. Whistleblowers from there told journalists that their investigation into Rotherham was a cover-up. They were told to look down, not up, and they were told to minimize their investigations. One of these whistleblowers, very brave man on camera,

said that he didn't think that report was worth the paper it was printed on. It was totally insufficient, and survivors have been saying that for years, but it's different when someone inside the building says it, right? The overlapping criminality is central to this. These people are making money out of this abuse. All these men are quite rich. One of the happiest parts that I've had of covering the story

has been supporting a survivor who sued her perpetrator in a landmark case two years ago. She's called Elizabeth. She's from Rotherham. It's not a real name. she was abused by a man 20 years ago called Ashgar Boston who was up for parole yesterday actually he was sentenced in 2018 for a nine-year term because he had raped her when she was 13

in a den where she was kept for weeks but she took him to court while he was in prison on a civil charge and she won 425,000 pounds money which he'll be able to hand over Because like many of these perpetrators, there's a bit of cash there. A lot of these guys are quite successful.

This is not some sort of like urchins from the community operation. These are upstanding members of the community as far as they're concerned. And they suffer no punishment when they come out of prison. When they leave prison and other evidence of the clannishness and the security and the high trust of these communities, they go straight back to where they came from. They go straight back to their families, straight back to the old lines of work. some of them literally as if they'd never been to prison at all and with the jail sentences they've had I mean I'm aware of abusers of being

two and a half year sentences in 2015 and one gang in Leeds straight out again two weeks car revealed that a grooming gang abuser in Leeds called Abid Eunice was trying to open a children's care home can you imagine can you imagine ever allowing someone who owns a home who has a grooming gang conviction, who's been to prison for grooming a 12-year-old girl and abusing her with a gang of at least 10 other men

and being like, yeah, I want to run a care home with that chap. No. But for this community, forgivable, permissible, possible as well. And there's another infuriating element is that there are people who have committed heinous crimes who aren't British citizens, who are Pakistani nationals,

and we can't deport them. So they commit. horrendous crimes and we can't even deport them. There are two men in particular who keep getting attention on this. One of them is called Carrey Ralph. He's in Rochdale and his associate.

They're in Rochdale. They're imprisoned as far as the first round of the Rochdale prosecutions led by a prosecutor called Nazia Afzal, prosecuted by a British Pakistani. And they got out of prison. They were set for deportation. They'd had their British nationality

stripped by their then-home secretary. But with legal aid, hundreds of thousands of pounds, they've successfully fought against deportation for years, well over a decade now, because of the European Convention of Human Rights, their right to family life. Can you imagine that? Their right to family life, having attacked children. It's like satire, almost. It's so horrendous. And they've successfully done so. Through my own research and survivors I've met and cases I've followed up, I know of more cases where perpetrators have fled justice because they know it's coming, then have been deported after a prosecution. I know more cases of people

voluntarily going back to Pakistan because there's no extradition treaty there, they won't get me, then have been actually kicked out of the country for their crimes. One of them knows that it's gone back and I'll, you know, I'd love to go out and knock on his door. But there's no point because the states won't go and pick him up because they can't. Under the 2022 Nationality and Borders Act, the government has powers to issue visa penalties. and foreign aid restrictions on countries that refuse to accept deportations. Government should do it for Pakistan, don't you think?

If they're refusing to accept these perpetrators being deported, why do we keep giving them millions in foreign aid and permitting them tens of thousands of visas to come and let people move for this country? But perhaps the government's quite weak on this. Perhaps that has been for a long time. This is the thing about the story is it's like at every layer and at every level,

there's something awful and more awful and more awful going on. And you're just going, these, and what I don't understand, and this is where I think the clash between a normal person's expectations of the justice system and the reality really happens. Because you're going, you mentioned two and a half years, but when you said, you know, this guy had been convicted of raping a 12-year-old with other men. Sure. And they got nine years. Sure. In my head, I'm going, nine years. Yes, yes.

What, how? Yeah. It's like, I think most people, when they think about somebody committing those crimes, being caught, being found guilty, being sentenced. You think they're getting 25, 30, 50 years, whatever it is. And then they're getting nine years probably coming out on parole earlier. It's like, what the hell is going on? Ashgar Bostar, the man I mentioned, you got the nine years.

He's actually, he was recalled to prison. He was released after four years of his nine-year sentence, and a part of that time was spent in an open prison. He was allowed to leave, right? And the victim of his abuse wasn't told, another example of huge state failure. He was recalled in January of last year because he was seen within a mile of his victim's house back in prison. He may come out again later this year. His hearing was yesterday.

He had to be confronted by the survivor. She was forced to make a statement against why he shouldn't be released on camera. How appalling is that? A man who wrecks you when you were 30 and you have to make the case that he stays in. He's still within that nine-year term. He's still within that nine-year term. And she has to plead with the parole board to not let him out twice. She's had to do this now.

Charlie, is part of the reason for this, I mean, people will say we have lax laws or whatever, but as part of the reasons for this, Dr. Ella Hill, who we had, who is a survivor. Yeah. She explained to us for the first time, I really hadn't known, neither of us really knew much about, that in actual fact, the one thing that got totally missed in all of this by the media very often and by others, is that in many, many cases, perhaps not always, but in most cases, these were racially aggravated, hate crimes. And is one of the reasons that they're getting sentences of two and a half, nine, whatever years, is that these crimes haven't been prosecuted for the crimes that they actually are.

So I think it's really key that they are recognized as racially aggravated offenses in a lot of cases. I think a lot of survivors are giving evidence to police officers to demonstrate that and they're not choosing to do so. Because we have this horrendous hierarchy of racism where if you're white, you can't possibly be a victim of racism. so it's just gone, it's removed from the possibility. I'm aware of just two cases where racially aggravated factors have been added to prosecutions, and there have been many, many successful prosecutions. I'm aware of many more than two survivors who have endured racialized elements to their abuse and then being specifically referred to being white and a target or kaffir,

all their sort of language about their suffering. So it just doesn't match. Is that a part of the reason why the sentences aren't good enough? It'd be a useful cop-out for the judges to say that, but it's not because two weeks ago in Bradford Crown Court, one man for child rape, several counts of child rape actually, was sentenced to again a eight or nine-year term. And in his mitigation, the judge said, well, this man clearly very reformed because he is regularly seen at the mosque where he's acting very well. It's insane that you would use that as mitigation and that it would be accepted. I think most people would expect the judge to completely disregard those mitigating. But in this case, the defence barrister

while I'm over and his sentence was adjusted accordingly. But having said that in September, I was at Sheffield Crown Court, a regular haunt for me now, considering the number of trials going through there in the recent years. A sentencing happened where a man got 26 years. He's appealing that sentence. Again, similar charges, child rate,

trafficking, exploitation. 26 years. Sentences do have guidelines. The judges have guidelines they have to act to. But there is some leeway there. And they can aggravate and mitigate according to the pleas of counsel. It just depends on what you accept, what you permit. Some judges permit more than others. But that 25-year, 26-year term I mentioned, I'm of the mind that it'll probably

get reduced. I'm also the mind that despite him almost certainly being a dual national, he won't be deported. In that, I was the only reporter in that sentencing, which is a scandal in itself because 106 years were by handing handed down to seven defendants, one of the most significant grooming gang trials in modern history. Nobody else was there. the survivor in that case, an extraordinarily brave woman. I'm proud to call a friend, gave her victim impact statement where she's allowed to address the defendants. Best thing I've ever witnessed in my life. I've had myself smiling, listening to her speak, because it was so compelling. I didn't look up. It's an open court, but for international audiences,

nothing is recorded in British courts. Some sentencings of the judge's remarks are televised for big cases. This wasn't, didn't count for some reason. But the, the victim impact statement, unless a reporter is there to record it, no one will ever know it happened unless you pay for a transcript and that can be tens of thousands of pounds. Really difficult to get. So I felt a bit of a duty there, actually, to get my head down and just tap everything out. I'm not so good on shorthand. I'm more of a typist.

And you also have to check against delivery. You can request copies of what's being said every time when the prosecutor speaks, you get a copy of his opening notes or her opening notes. which she delivers the case against the defendants. But if you just copy and paste from that, the CPS will be all over you because if it's not what was said in court, it's wrong, you've committed a journalistic breach.

I had to make sure that every single word that she said was spot on. So I just typed out thousands of words, 15 minutes. It was incredible. She told them, you stole my childhood. Now I'm taking away your freedom. I am your karma. That was her ending line.

Yeah. and they were faced, they were like this glum, and then the public gallery packed to their afters with supporting family members, I should add, clannishness. One of them outraged leaving while they sent it as well a hand down. One of the abusers in that trial, given that 26-year term, as he stood up to leave, daughter shouted,

I love you, dad. Just can't imagine it. Just can't imagine it for a different community, really. And she did that. But at the end of that, I realized that what was in the story, statement I had in front of me from the CPS and what she said were different. It was an element that been taken out. And I heard the judge conferring with the prosecuting barrister and they said,

and that matter, of course, before we hear a statement from the survivor, that's one for the home office, not for this court, we can leave it be. Turns out, she had requested in her victim impact statement for her defendants to be deported and they censored it. They removed it from her statement. She was not allowed to stand. up in open court, having been abused as an 11-year-old girl, gang raped in taxis, abused by over 100 men by the time she was 16, there, some of them were receiving British justice, very long overdue. And she was told, you can't say that. You actually can't call on them to be deported. The state should do everything it can to facilitate these girls being able to deliver and say

whatever they want and to get the sort of justice that they've been denied for decades. and that they were censoring her. It was quite remarkable to see them openly conferring about it. And I think they were hoping that I hadn't picked up on it. But I had. And I spoke after with her. She was like, yeah, yeah, that was what I wanted to say. Couldn't do it.

And do you know what? They probably won't be deported. So what's the point in her saying it anyway? Because it won't ever happen. Do you know, that's probably one of the most disgusting things that anyone has ever told me about anything. Yeah. I wish you were an outlier.

And I think one of the problems I've had covering this issue for so many years is that I hear you saying that, I mean, it wasn't for me. Like I've heard so many appalling things now that when I hear stuff, I almost have to check against it with a colleague to be like, what do you make of this? They're like, well, that's horrendous. It does numb you to the severity of this because you think what is an outlier for one person's life.

It's actually quite constant for a lot of lives that you've met. When you think there are tens of thousands of victims, when you hear these stories all the time, you have to really not just emotionally regulate yourself to what you're hearing, but also to recognise that it's not normal? Well, this is my point. Obviously, I'm worried it is normal.

I'm worried it is normal. The abuse itself is obviously the worst thing about this case, and nobody should say anything other than that. But I guess, you know what I mean when I say it's the most disgusting thing that I've ever heard? We all know that we live in a society where certain truths can't be spoken out loud and public. But if you've been gang raped as a child and you are having your day in court,

and even in that context, you, the victim, are not allowed to express your opinion about what should happen to these people because it's racist or whatever it is. I don't even know that wanting to deport criminals is in any way discriminatory. I'm a foreign person. If I committed crimes like that, I should. should absolutely be stripped of my nationality and sent back. But the fact that the people who represent our state in this instance, whose job it is to deliver justice, care about that and want to keep survivors from expressing that sentiment, I think that's outrageous. I think it's disgusting. A very good friend of mine is Maggie Oliver, the whistleblur from Rochdale, who exposed a scandal there, great detective constable who sort of blew the lid on what was going there,

and has led to many investigations in Greater Manchester. She's always told me over many years, all too often, in fact, always the state will prioritise human rights of the perpetrators over those of the victims. And I find that the state is very happy to be precise and legalistic about so many things about, oh, you can't say that in the court. But when it comes to the actual overall job of ensuring justice, little bits and bobs just go missing. So in Maggie's case, what she found about what was going on in Rochdale, for example, there was a gold level meeting, which has been held by very senior officer at Great Manchester Police. And they made a decision to shut down an investigation to child abuse at the time, even though there was clearly a massive

problem that identified hundreds of perpetrators, many of whom are now currently walking free in my country as we speak. And they shut it down and the minutes for that meeting were lost. That's a precise example of what I'm talking about, right? They're so precise, they're active. They follow the letter of the law on so many things. Can't say that in court. But they'll just, oh, lose minutes and forget to shut,

explain why they shut that down. You can't request those minutes of that meeting. You can't even get a whistleblower to come forward. No one's got the minerals from that meeting to come up and own up about what happened. No one's got the bollocks who was in that meeting to say 20 years on. Oh yeah, I was part of a group that shut down an investigation. into child abuse. I would love them to do it anonymously.

I'd protect them. I'd protect every source. I would love them to come forward and explain why that happened. I don't mind if they dobb in someone else. Someone's got to come forward and explain why they shut down that meeting. Don't care who it is. Gold level would have been some serious pensions in that room. All those pensions were protected because they did nothing. There are so many other examples like that around the country.

Rather than files went missing. Laptops were stolen. Rooms were broken into Telford, the child investigation, The child abuse investigation team was minimised to such a level it might as well not have existed. No one's ever been held accountable for that. None of these investigations could compel witnesses. And so, as this story has come back, one of the reasons it did so, Elon Musk started reading about it.

He's got a great link to this country. He also cares about people. He's quite as well within his rights to speak up about this issue. Some people say he shouldn't be talking about it. I've got a few words for those people. No, he has. And then I had a story ready to go, right? Which I wasn't going to do at the time, which was that Oldham Council, which is a council in Greater Manchester, had put forward a request of the government for a government-led investigation into the grooming gangs in the town. So in 2022, they were part of that Andy Burnham review I mentioned, which also did Rochdale's, an assurance review they called it.

Survivors in the town, families, they all said it was a cover-up. Nobody was compelled to give evidence. The terms of reference, they looked at 2011 to 2014. I know survivors from 2001. I've met more even in the last few months. So it was a total stitch-up, that review, did nothing. Nobody held accountable. The two men who ran it, Gary and Malcolm, Ridgeway and Newsom.

It's not their fault, right? Total legends. They did a great job with what they had, but they just weren't allowed to do anything. I revealed last year that they had resigned from Andy Burnham's investigation team because they were denied access to investigations from Greater Manchester Police and they said that legal powers were coming on them, stopping them talking to survivors. I didn't exactly hide that story. In caps, revealed two men resigned.

Nobody cared. We did it on GB News for a few days and then nobody caught on to this. I should have led newspapers. Two men are resigning from a child abuse investigation because the police are blocking them. Nobody cared. no alarm bills went off. A lot of politicians talking about it now, but when I raised it at their time and I showed them, whatever. So Olden, having had this stitch-up investigation, they wanted the government to lead in, compel investigations, proper investigations, proper statutory legal powers. Turned down by Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister. Turned it down in October.

Sent off an FOI asking for the letter, freedom of information requests, what we call it. So the government has to give you information. They gave me this information. I got it all signed off, got a statement from the home office, which is our, the big department by early December. But I didn't run it. I didn't run the story because it was like Christmas time and I didn't think it would do very well. And it wasn't the right time to do it. Parliament was in recess.

No politicians were around. It wouldn't have an effect. I also chose not to run it because I knew nobody else was on this. There's no other journalists looking at that area. So everyone loves to scoop in journalism. Everyone likes to be first. And once you've got one, you're keen to disseminate. urgently because you want to have that story out there. I felt no such pressure. I was sitting on

something pretty big. I was happy as Larry because I knew there was no one else knocking on the door for it. So when Elon started tweeting about it, it was New Year's Day. I was away. I was out of town having a holiday actually. I thought I've got to do it now. I've got to put that story out now. Put it out and the next day Elon shared it. Thank you very much. And the next day, Kimmy Bade not called for a National Inquiry, the leader of the Conservatives. She could have called for it a year before, but she chose to call it that day, whatever. Sometimes politicians need a media moment

to justify their interventions. This was it for her. Since then, that first week, actually, a lot of people said, we don't need this because we've already had these inquiries. And also this is a problem of the past, right? This has all been done. We've rather than, that's just Rotherham, right?

2014. And in fairness, there were also people like me, and I'm glad you directed me because I posted something about this and you were like action. A lot of people are very skeptical of the power of inquiries to do anything. And part of the reason is you're a lot younger than us. If you lived through the Iraq war,

and then there was about 57 different inquiries, which all found miraculously that no one did anything wrong and everything was wonderful. There's no shortage of stitch-up inquiries in this country. But some of them work. The infected blood scandal, for example, that's found people are happy about that. Victims of that, happy about it.

But yeah, when it comes to big pressure stuff, a lot of the times they look the other way. The problem with this, and the reason why a national inquiry would be so good and so effective, I think, is because the guilty men and women, the evidence against them would come out so effectively and they'd have to come forward. Even the most immense Stalin-style cover-up merchant couldn't possibly get rid of this one. But in that week after, people kept saying, you know, oh, it's all the thing in the past. After I released that documentary in 2023, Suella Braberman, the much hated home-sexist, at the time, completely derided by the liberal media. She launched a grooming gang's task force, which have you watched documentary, one of the things we call for at the end. We call for National Crime Agency, Britain's FBI, NCAA, NCAA-NCA-led investigations into every part of the country where it's going on. So they launched this task force. In its first year, 2023 to 2024, it made over 550 arrests and protected 4,000 victims. When they made that

announcement last year, I got to interview the safeguarding minister, as did one other journalist, but there were no other requests. They just revealed that there are thousands of victims still being identified in one year from a newly established force, which is still up and running, working out his powers, working out how it can do stuff. 500 arrests, new ongoing issues. Some of them I imagine will be non-recent, but they've not shared the data, funny enough. But what they've demonstrated is an ongoing problem. Alarm bell should have been popping off everywhere that they weren't. People just sort of went back up. Another grooming gang story. Who really cares? It's that difficult issue that we don't want to get into. So it moved on. That was the last big media moment on

it and it wasn't even that much of a moment. So just resharing that fact that in one year you made all those arrests and you protected all those victims. It's so important to completely run over this myth that this is a thing of the past. This is this is some northern towns in the 2000s. No, this is here and now. This is across the country everywhere now. And Charlie, Yvette Cooper came out and said that there was going to be a national inquiry after, because, let's be fair, because of the great work done by yourselves and also pressure done by a lot of other activists and journalists. Are you optimistic that we're going to finally see justice done? I mean, two minds about this. So I think, first of the foremost,

is great that there's any government action at all on this. But let's not forget, I mean, a week, a week or so before the Home Secretary of Eck Cooper made that announcement, the Prime Minister was at a hospital in Surrey doing a press conference about the NHS. All the questions after well were about grooming gangs. And he said he was concerned that politicians were jumping on a bandwagon amid far right poison. Was he being cynical? Do you know what? I think he actually believes that. I think he actually thinks it is a far right issue to care about this. But this is also worth pointing out as well that he was head of prosecutions in 2011.

he actually said that this was a cultural issue. He said we've let down generations of girls. But he was in the DPP for a bit while before 2011. And the CPS, the prosecution service in the country, has failed in several areas. Recently excellent work from Channel 4 in Barrow in Cumbria has shown that the CPS recommended or neglected charges of abuse victims in that area. There are big questions to answer for prosecutors. Perhaps Kirstarmer doesn't want an investigation in part because

he'd be called to give evidence. Why not? DPP, Director of Prosecutions during that period. I'm sure he'd have to give some evidence about it. It probably wouldn't be a great time for him. It's not to say he's been involved in any wrongdoing, but he still have to speak about it. He had a significant role when this issue was at its height.

So he made that intervention about the far right, a week before. You know what? I was standing in Tameside in Greater Manchester, an area where there's never been an investigation, but it's right below Alderman Rochdale. And again, there's no force field there. I know girls were trafficked into that area and abuse as well.

And in fact, I met with a father or a victim that afternoon, very soon after, Sirkeir gave that intervention. And I was happy, he said far right, because I know how the media works in this country, right? I work in it. I knew that gave the story five more days. I was really worried that because the Elon thing, everyone would move away from the screaming lang's moment that I got back from my holiday pretty much instantly.

I went straight back to doing a sort of going around the country, getting back in touch with survivors and families I met before. I was really nervous that it was just going to be GBM news talking about it and no one else would be on it. But as soon as Sakeir Stama said, far right, beaming. I was absolutely beaming. Clearly it's an offensive thing to have done, to have disparage so many people who care about this far right.

But for me, I was like, oh, he's done it. He's given the newspapers a reason to get stuck in and, you know, learn behold, the next day, the front page, the Daily Mail was going into him. The Telegraph did the same. loads of other papers were getting stuck in on this issue. And the rhetoric continued for a week because it gave politicians a bit of ammunition,

it kept the story alive. It's a shame, of course, that so much of the focus was on Elon Musk and what Kemi and Keir said in Parliament and not what I think it should have been on the survivors in their stories and the appalling travesties that have come to light. I was disturbed by the number of newspapers

who got in touch with me and said, oh, can you introduce us to some survivors? Da-da-da-da-da-da. It was like, well, you should have been on this for years. Have you not built those contacts? This is a national travesty. How have you not maintained those links? Have you lost them?

Some of them did a good job. Some of them had a few people they'd spoken to over the years. A lot of journalists of those connections, but a lot of them had let it fall away. So, Yvette Kubei, let's go back to that. Sorry, me. I've got it sidetracked. Yvette Cooper did make that intervention on the 16th or 17th. In the House of Commons, she said, among several demands,

there would be five locally led inquiries. One of them will be Oldham, which is the area that made that request. It won't be government-led. It won't be statutory. There won't be witnesses being compelled. It'll be the same model as Telford, which the government thinks was a very effective method. They say that survivors there think it was very effective. It's true.

They found lots of problems. But tell me, Ms. Cooper, who was sacked in Telford? Who was prosecuted on the back of the report? Zero people. Nobody. Never. That's not an effective model, is it? So what do we need, Charlie? What are you calling for? What should happen here? Well, I'm a report, so I can't call for anything.

Sure you can. Let's see. What needs to happen? I'll go through the rest of what Yvette Cooper said, because it's important to get to the bottom of what the government's doing now. They've got that one and all of them. But for others, where would they be? Will this be like Ixar? Will they choose six areas that don't matter?

Will they go back to Warwickshire? Or they go to Bradford? Or they go to Bradford? Will they go to areas that I know would dwarf Rotherham? So what areas of those? those. Bradford? Bradford, Huddersfield, Birmingham, the whole West Midlands, really. Wolverhampton needs to be included in that, Solly Hole in the East as well. Really important they look around the West Midds in general. Nottingham. East Midlands, too. We'd love to see a Scotland-wide investigation as well. I think Glasgow's really fascinating. The abuse gangs there. Newcastle needs it's an

independent investigation. Hell, I could list 50 different towns of cities. I can keep going. We go to Oxford, Bambury, Aylesbury, any parts of Buckinghamshire, really. High Wickham's really important to go to. be good to go to Bristol. I'd love it if they went back to Telford and did a proper investigation there. I'd be delighted they went to Merseyside. It'd be good if they could look into those areas. Fundamentally, what's needed is a national inquiry.

The entire nation it needs to be looked into on a national level, compelling people. That would be costly, and it would take time. But do you know what's more costly? Do you know what takes more time? Doing nothing letting people suffer. They've also announced part of this intervention that the Home Secretary made.

There's going to be a rapid three-month audit being led by Dame Louise Casey, the woman who in 2015 looked into Roderum and said it was a cover up there. So she's going to lead an investigation of data they've already got. I think that's a pre-written conclusion. It's going to come back and say, we've got no data because these forces have messed up catastrophically and has been shown time and time again. They just don't collect the data. They'd rather not.

Hampshire, for example, is the worst county for collecting data. Why is that? It makes me nervous. Why in Hampshire, which doesn't really have a significant issue, I think, with this sort of abuse, as far as I can tell. Why are they not recording the ethnicity of child sexual abuse perpetrators? Perhaps there's something going on there. We don't know about. It'd be great to have an inquiry to work it out. So I think she'll come back and say we don't know when we need further investigation. And I think the government is now tiptoeing towards an inquiry that they can't call for on the back of pressure from the opposition, Elon Musk and GB News.

They can't be seen to give in to us, especially after calling us far. right seven days prior, right? Doesn't necessarily work politically. I think they're possibly creating their own political capital to make a decision that was impossible before. But there are people in number 10 I've spoken to say, that's not the case. There's definitely not a case. And they're not speaking to me in their capacity as this is going to get reported. They're speaking to me as people just on their own of their note, right? Who are saying, now we think we've done enough to push this issue down and it's not going to come back and that'll be it. But, you know, Sarah Champion stood up. She's MP for Rotherham, Labour MP. She said that they needed to be a national inquiry. She said

they needed to compel witnesses. She also called for, what I think was really interesting, a commission on the motivation behind the gangs. She says, we know about the abuse. We don't really know why it happens. She is what she's doing that, I think, she's never spoken to me, I've tried. What I think she's doing there is saying, we need to work out those ethnicity issues, those cultural issues, that clannishness, the sexism, those attitudes that we've never really investigated. That's what she's saying, because we don't know. She's calling for free speech and investigation and discussion and proper inquiry into that sort of crisis. One of the reasons why it's so important, I think we'd dispel all those myths that would get to the truth of it, but perhaps that might come

out of it. Nobody else has backed up her call for it. One other Labour MP, Dan Cardin, it's a former Corbynite, but he's become a bit more of a sort of on the right of the party under the Blue Labor tradition, Morris Glasman, all that stuff. He's sort of moved a bit and he's a bit of a journey, I think. He came out quite boldly before Sarah Champion did. Actually, he was the first MP to break ranks, and he said, this is an atrocity which we need to fix, and we should use

all powers of the state, including a national inquiry, to get to the bottom of it. He's right. It is an atrocity. And I've got rid of the report a bit now. I'll be honest, you know, I think this is a story I care about so much, right? It's clear what I want, and that is guilty men and women held to account. Perpetrators properly dealt with, and for us as a

society to confront what's really happening here. That requires a national inquiry, which takes into account that the motivations element, which takes into out corruption, collusion, which gets people in front of barristers and a judge. I'd preferably want someone not from this country, by the way,

a foreign judge to come and do it, who aren't tainted by... That's so damning, Charlie. I would like that. I would... A lot of people will agree with you, man. I would hate... I would hate to have one of these KCs that I've seen, or QCs, or whatever, over the years who kind of reduced their tone in court when they say, when they make a reference to the racialized element of the abuse,

I would hate for one of these like, I'm a posh boy. I was raised in Surrey. I went to Winchester. I went to the same school as Rishi. I've got a philosophy degree from Edinburgh, right? I understand these people. They are nervous talking about this stuff. And you can hear it in their voices.

They sort of quiver when they have to make the prosecution notes, when they have to tell the truth, when they have to make the case for the prosecution. I would hate for one of those judges. or barristers to be part of the game. I want someone to come, yeah, maybe someone like, you know, English speaking and common law like an Aussie judge to come over who could air our dirty laundry in public to really expose what's going on here to show it for what it is

without being wrapped up in the cultural sensitivities and the conscience of cover-up, which I think really does actually impact all classes in this country, but particularly lawyers who I think are very shy people who don't want to go back to their friends and family in whatever cozy part of the country they live in and say, I have that terrible Pakistani rape gang business today couldn't really get into it.

Felt a bit shy. Don't want to upset my friends. I think that's a problem. I do think we need a foreign judge to lead on this. But what you're actually saying is that you've got no faith in the system whatsoever to bring justice for these poor girls and boys. I think it's impossible to have faith in the state after looking at this problem.

This state has failed so severely. It is like there is no greater example of the lethal mix of active incompetence and malice to prioritize a false vision of the country over justice. Absolutely. It's the most damning story. It drives a stake right through the heart of the liberal project. It's not a motivation for me to get into it. I didn't really have any politics when I started looking this. I was an 18-year-old. I was pretty apolitical, actually, when I first was, like, ripped, as I said, from that serenity and that comfort of England that I knew before. Didn't really have any political views. I've learned about my country a lot through this issue because of what it shows our priorities to be, what it shows the state to be. And fundamentally, the state thinks you are an extremist if you think the things I do about this. A leaked report confirmed that just recently, that a home office department. Riku, which is the Research and Communications Unit, they think that caring about alleged grooming gangs of their language, not mine, is an example of far-right extremism, right-wing extremism. But it's not, it's a problem and it's real. It's happening now, 4,000 victims, 500 arrests, one year. So the state thinks that if you care about innocent boys and girls being raped

by Pakistani rape gangs, that makes you far wrong. right and a racist. Yeah, absolutely. How disgusting is that? It's revolting, but it's achievable insofar as the only voices who've wanted to talk about this for so long have been right wing or extreme right wing or whatever you want to call it. You know, a name we've not mentioned yet, and I often get criticized for not mentioning his name. Tommy Robinson.

He cares a lot about this issue. He has spoken about it a lot. Now, I don't think he's a good example of someone to get things done on this issue, because he nearly collapsed a set of trials in Huddersfield in 2018. He was very critical. He was very much criticised for that because he filmed some defendants as they were leaving court. As I said before, a lot of trials are linked. You can't report on one until the other is done because of contempt of court in this country. If you're a journalist, you know by that. I think Tony Robinson isn't a journalist. He's more of an activist. And so he didn't know about this, perhaps. That

was his defence. But he's certainly almost collapsed more trials than he's instigated. Okay. So I also, like you were saying about the Islam thing, I think he ties it more into an anti-Islam agenda than a proper looking into this approach. I think too many people do that. They lack onto this because they care about Islam more than they care about what's really going on. The uglier truth is actually so much worse than this being a religious thing. In a way, I wish it were because religion is easier to remove than clannishness. I think people become secularised in Britain over time. I don't think that's true of this community in this way for what they're. they're going through. So it's been very easy to derive people as far right or as extreme

because the only voices doing it have been, that's been frank, on the extreme of society. The BNP, the racist party, the BNP was campaigning on this in the 2000s, right? They're the only voices going on about it. The BNP were right in some of these towns about this issue. They were right. They were right to care about it. Now, their intentions may have been wrong. Andrew Norfolk, when he said it was a far right fantasy, he was right. But that's no excuse. for not doing the right thing and not caring. That's no excuse for liberal voices or left-wing voices. I don't consider myself left-wing or liberal, but it's no excuse for those voices to skip out on this, as they have done for fear of standing side by side with those they may disagree with more broadly

on political issues. Everyone should care about this issue and the motivation should be to get justice and change the cover-up culture that has led to this abuse. But because only the voices who see political opportunity and have spoken about it generally, that's been a problem. We also haven't heard, I think very much from the Pakistani community.

Kishwa Faulkner, the chair of the ECHR, no, the HRC, EHRC, Quality and Human Rights Commission, EHRC, yeah. She wrote in the Times recently that

she is British Pakistani herself. She's an immigrant. She has said that it shames her community. She shames Pakistanis. that it's not being confronted properly. People haven't come out and said this. In my documentary as a man called Wazik, a proud British-Pakistani man,

who does say this is an issue of Klanish, this is something we've got to get grips with, we've got to get rid of this. What happens to those voices? Are they celebrated or are they derided those voices? What happens when they are put forward? Are they appreciated? Are they applauded or are they ignored or derided?

They're derided and ignored every time. I haven't had a single politician praise Ms. Faulkner for intervention. I certainly haven't heard anyone come out to back for Wazique, Wazique, a very brave man. So yeah, it's going to take a lot of people coming forward to give this the cultural capital it needs as well

for it to be something overcome. But I think it's Elon Musk that's done it, right? It's impossible to ignore when it's that loud. And it's that sentencing remark he took from Oxford one of the trials. There are many more horrendous paragraphs like that when he showed what one of the offenders

Carrar had done in Oxford. but the branding of the girl, but the gang rape, the torture. Torture is used in this. So often you hear torture in the prosecution. It was him saying that that I think made people realize and wake up to what it was. So more noise,

but also more noise from more people, a broader range. That will make a difference. It's something that should be front page news until it gets dealt with every day is how I feel about it. I'm very grateful for the work you're doing, Charlie. It's very important. And you certainly convinced me about the National Inquiry.

I think a lot of us are very skeptical. But I think the pressure needs to be put on. And we'll certainly keep doing it. And I hope you keep doing it. It's my obsession, frankly. So I will. Well, of all the things that a young man could be obsessed about, actually protecting people who've been treated in this way

and then not backed or protected by the people whose job it is to protect them, and then ignored by the people whose job it is to report on it, That's a pretty good thing to be obsessed about. So we appreciate you and thanks for the work you're doing. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second on substack. But I think in your case it would be useful if you perhaps when you answer our final question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about?

Maybe it's something to do with this that we've missed or not, perhaps. There's something very interesting where you've mentioned it in other interviews, Charlie, where you talk about the statistics. the two in every thousand, et cetera, et cetera. Because I think those are really quite shocking and horrifying. And we didn't actually touch on it in the main interview. I wish you'd three more of these. There's so much to get through.

You mentioned actually right the beginning about terminology. I just want to get onto this before we finish, because it's important. Then I'll come on to that. Because I think you mentioned it because you're concerned about the term grooming, right? Perhaps a bit. Of course.

Well, it's a euphemism that covers up the reality of what these things are. I've heard this a lot. There's a lot of good reason behind having that concern. grooming gang does not even go close to being far enough to summarising some of the abuse that these children endured. But it is really important to keep using the term grooming. I prefer, you know, grooming rape gang or grooming torture gang, grooming abuse gang. I like to include, I'd always include them about grooming because it's a very specific form of child sexual exploitation, the grooming model and the boyfriend model of exploitation where you convince a child that what's happening to them is normal.

You do literally groom them. People say, oh, grooming is what you do to pets, not to children. No, these perpetrators do groom these children, okay? I've been really distressed actually by the number of comments I've seen about that in response to their work on this recently. They do make them feel as though they're loved. A lot of these girls, as you mentioned these boys as well, they come from appallingly difficult backgrounds. They're in care. Some of the children are like given money when they were kids by people who looked after them to reward them for doing basic stuff, a quid for making your bed at a care home.

You know, so they're rewarded for something like that. And then imagine what it's like you go out of your care home, 12 or you come out of school or you know you get away from your parents for a minute and someone gives you all the lavish love and attention in the world they think you're the best things since sliced bread they make you feel incredible that's grooming that's what's going on and plying them with alcohol and drugs is always mentioned it's a really common form it's the classic form of exploitation in this case but it starts with sweets starts with a little treat starts with a little bit of love starts a bit of attention starts with

Making a child feel as though they're special when everything in the world is, everything else in the world, it's conspiring to make them feel like dirt. So I will, well, plea with people listening and watching to keep using the term grooming, because survivors I know are also concerned that the word grooming is being cut from this because it's what they endured. They were made to feel as though what they happened was normal. Even while they were being abused, they called their abusers, their boyfriends because they were children. Didn't know any better. They thought what was happening was normal and grooming is like a lottery, okay?

once one person gets your number, everyone gets your number. You never know when you're going to get called and what's going to go on it. It's all over the place. Right? It's normalized. They're groomed into making, into believing it's normal. That's really important, I think. On to the numbers.

The numbers are so in this story, in the cycle of how you get a story, it's collection, processing, analysis and dissemination. Sometimes you flip around the processing and analysis. You work out how you're going to deal with what you've got, how you collect it, and then you work out what you think about it. What's the best way to summarize this story? How do I frame it? What's the top line? Who else am I going to speak to?

Which experts will I get on that? The hardest bit of any part of journalism is dissemination. How do I get the story out? Who am I going to convince that they have to click on this story? Who's going to watch this interview? You two are rather good at Cementation. I'm not stressed your view of doing well. But when it comes to a story of this magnitude,

how you disseminate that, how you summarize it, It's really difficult. And not much for stats, go I. More of a human experiences person. I've always thought that storytelling was the most compelling thing. That's why I work in TV, I think, you know, audio, visual experiences really make people realise what's going on. Certainly wrong in this case.

Those voices are vital, but what I found more often than not is tying them in with just the facts that we have already, the data, there's the pure data on prosecution. It has made even my most liberal and well-meaning on open borders adjacent associates completely just go, wow, you're so right. Between 1997, 2016, one in every 2,200 Muslim men over 16 in this country were prosecuted for group localised child sexual exploitation. One in every 2,200. Telford, it was one and every 120 something. Rochdale a little less. In Rotherham, it was one in 73 men from a Pakistani background,

with a Pakistani name in the trials, all the court records you can go through. One in 73 being prosecuted. These are not isolated cases from a community. This is a community that knows what is going on. These are clans operating with the support of war. another trafficking to each other. And those numbers are unavoidable. Anyone who reads those figures can't escape them. Okay. And that's just been collated for a 20-year period. And that's just from prosecutions. In an era when the state and the prosecutions haven't wanted to take place, right?

Many still are pending. The National Crime Agency's investigation in Therodon has dozens of live investigations ongoing. I expect I will attend many more openings of many more trials, in Sheffield in Manchester and any other Crown Courts around the country for many years to come. One in 73 is not as bad as it actually is for Rotherham, I think. I think it's far worse. One in 2,200 is an insufficient summary in the numbers of what's going on. That is a small static. It's tighter than that.

It's worse than that. I think if you take anything away from all of this, is that those numbers point to the fact that this is a... clannish cultural cover-up with a community which is struggling with concepts of honour and shame in child abuse. And that prefers to look the other way when this is going on. And it has to be confronted. Charlie, thank you so much for coming on the show and for all your work. Thanks having me. Thank you. Make sure to join us on substep where we carry on the conversation. Make Mother's Day even more special at Whole Foods Market. Kick off brunch or dinner with

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