Nottingham Socialist Party member
The intervention of Elon Musk – the world’s richest man, and soon-to-be member of Trump’s administration – into the issue of ‘grooming gangs’ in Britain, is shocking exploitation of the horrors of child sexual abuse.
After the Labour government rejected a new national inquiry to investigate the issue, Musk labelled Jess Phillips, the government’s safeguarding minister, a “rape genocide apologist”. He has been opportunistically supported by right-wing elements of the Tory party. Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, runner-up in the Tory leadership election, has talked of “alien cultures”, backed by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.
The Tory party’s motives are clear: to try and win back voters from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which has also politically weaponised this issue.
These individuals are calling for a new inquiry into child sexual exploitation by organised networks of adults. Their calls have racist undertones, highlighting those networks that have involved south Asian men, although Home Office data does not show that there is a link between race and child sexual abuse.
Those survivors of child sexual exploitation who have spoken out publicly are overwhelmingly against a new inquiry, instead wanting the recommendations of the previous inquiry to be implemented without further delay.
The Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) took seven years and was published in October 2022. It covered child sexual abuse and exploitation in a range of settings, including religious institutions, prisons, schools, six areas where there were organised exploitation networks, and abuse within the family.
Most child sexual abuse occurs within family settings. Research for the IICSA enquiry found that, of the thousands of survivors they spoke to, 47% were abused by a family member and 42% were abused in their own home.
There were twenty recommendations in the final report, none of which have yet been implemented. These included a national guarantee of specialist therapy for child victims, fully funded and delivered by local authorities.
Ensuring that survivors of abuse, children who are currently being abused and exploited, and children who are at risk of this, get the support they need will require a massive increase in resources to local authorities and other public agencies.
Given that the Labour government is doubling down on its austerity policies, additional funding will only be secured through a mass struggle involving unions and political and community campaigners to demand the money that’s needed.