Braverman’s Dog Whistle

The home secretary, Suella Braverman, announced at the weekend that the government will consult on a plan to ensure people working with children in England have a legal duty to report signs or suspicions of any form of sexual abuse. Of course, this sounds like a perfectly reasonable proposal by Braverman and Rishi Sunak. After all, nothing causes more revulsion than the actions of grooming gangs.

But Braverman’s announcement was quickly overshadowed by her accompanying plan to create a new grooming gang taskforce, led by police forces and supported by the National Crime Agency, to be made up of officers with extensive experience of undertaking investigations into child sexual exploitation by criminal gangs. In an article on grooming gangs for the Mail on Sunday, Braverman deliberately singled out British-Pakistani men as key offenders, claiming: “The perpetrators are groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani.” She also claimed that Labour councils had deliberately turned a blind eye to signs of abuse, over fears of being seen as racist. She told the BBC that ‘politicians in Labour-run areas … absolutely failed to take action because of cultural sensitivities.’

Nazir Afzal, the former chief prosecutor in the northwest of England, has previously warned of the danger in focusing ‘entirely on the ethnicity of the offender’ rather than looking at best practice in protecting victims of child sex abuse. To add to concerns about this focus on ethnicity, the Home Office itself – Braverman’s very own department – produced a report in 2020 which found that group-based sex offenders are ‘most commonly white and under 30’. It concluded that there was no evidence that any one ethnic group was over-represented in cases of child sexual exploitation. The Home Office had previously tried to suppress publication of the report, stating it was for internal use only and that releasing it was not in the public interest, but had to bow to public opinion and publish the report [you can read here], in response to a Freedom of Information request by The Independent newspaper. The report said that although a number of high-profile grooming cases, including Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford, mainly involved men of Pakistani origin, ‘links between ethnicity and this form of offending’ could not be proven.

So why have the Tories latched onto the issue of grooming gangs now? Could it be to create election-time controversy, enraging voters, particularly those in the Midlands and the North of England? Is it to somehow demonstrate that they are the party willing to say that which is un-PC? To challenge the so-called woke-ness of the liberal centre-left? It seems to be a deliberate strategy to inflame tensions and to cause fear.

Just today, the self-elected spokesman of the far-right, Tommy Robinson, released a talking head video in response to Braverman’s dog-whistle comments, which is now circulating on social media. Robinson thanks the home secretary for listening to him and continuing on with his ‘work’. What a terrifying thought.

The Tories might consider their pre-election tirade against grooming gangs to be a roaring success with the public, but it should be noted that Labour called for mandatory reporting of suspected sexual abuse a decade ago. Starmer himself was the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time.

Nazir Afzal, who worked with Starmer and successfully prosecuted the Rochdale grooming gang, accuses the Home Secretary of ‘playing to a certain audience’ that is also anti refugees and asylum seekers and describes the focus on the ethnicity as ‘dangerous territory’. It also creates additional risks for victims of CSE, as could give them a ‘false sense of security’ when facing white predators. Mr Afzal welcomes the Government’s announcement on mandatory reporting but says that the majority of child sexual exploitation is not carried out by grooming gangs, and that he frequently prosecuted ‘virtually all white’ paedophile rings stating that ‘You are six or seven times more likely as a white guy to be a predator.’

Braverman’s plan for tougher sentencing on CSE and child abuse is further weakened by the fact that currently only 11 per cent of child sexual abuse cases end up with a charge, down from 32 per cent seven years ago. Convictions for child abuse dropped by a staggering 45%. Another major flaw in her plan is the fact that children’s social services have been quite literally cut to the bone, with workers having to focus on firefighting and having no resources for prevention. Children are less safe now than a decade ago.

The Government also appears to be attempting to create another wedge issue, to harm Labour’s place in the polls, but the likelihood is this will only serve to inflame racial tensions and damage community relations more generally. We’ve already seen what deploying incendiary language and ignoring basic facts has done in the context of asylum seekers and refugees.

In presenting her inflammatory and incorrect arguments, Braverman is merely emboldening the far right and the only likely winners in this dangerous game are the Tommy Robinson figures and his ilk, whilst also creating the very real possibility of electoral gains for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.

But what is desperately, desperately wrong here is that the victims/ survivors of child sexual exploitation, who are being used as political pawns in the government’s game, could be placed in more danger. The strategy of employing dog-whistle politics and stereotyping sex offenders through incorrect, ethnicity-based assertions is likely to make girls even more vulnerable to predators. That is unforgivable.