Public servants are getting it in the neck from all quarters, particularly over child protection. But we must remember that the work they do is being threatened by ever-spiralling council cuts
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Shabir Ahmed was the ringleader of a gang of Asian men who groomed young white girls for sex in Rochdale and Oldham. Photograph: Greater Manchester police/PA
I've just been listening to a retired social worker and Rochdale council's chief executive being harried on Radio 4's Today programme over the failure of the town's police and social services to protect teenage girls from predatory sexual exploitation. It comes as a report is published in the wake of prison sentences for nine men involved in an organised sex ring earlier this year.
Alas, we're getting used to this sort of story. This week the Times, whose reporter Andrew Norfolk has done a lot of good work in this area, published a similar exposé in Rotherham, where again both social workers and police seem to have treated the teenagers not as victims but as complicit young adults, even as prostitutes.
It's shocking stuff and reflects the chaotic way morality ebbs and flows in a society as currently unrestrained as our own. It now transpires that the French police are not looking very hard for the missing 15-year-old schoolgirl Megan Stammers and her teacher boyfriend (30), because 15 is the age of consent in France, so what's the big deal? TV veteran Anne Diamond has fallen foul of the Daily Mail for saying as much on Sky News. What price European cultural relativism, eh? Catholic versus Protestant?
Apart from the human cost (one victim interviewed anonymously for Today sounded very frightened and very sad, after also being repeatedly failed by the authorities) the issue interests me for two reasons. One is the obvious one, about which I have written before: that group grooming, as distinct from solitary sexual predators, tend to be by British Asians of Pakistani Muslim background living in poorer communities in the north.
Clearly it's a sensitive subject, which the far-right is keen to exploit. Not all such grooming rings are so described, certainly not the eight men sentenced to between 44 months and seven years at Derby crown court this month if we judge them by their names. The BBC sets out the controversy here. .
But no amount of fair-mindedness can duck the conclusion that there's a cultural problem in the attitudes of some Asian men towards their own women that results in them abusing teenage white girls in industrial towns and cities.
It has to be addressed, not swept under a traditional village rug, and plenty of public figures – including British Asians and Martin Nairey of Barnado's – agree. We don't do people favours by condoning or pretending to ignore things we know are wrong because they offend sensibilities, whether it's intra-cousin marriage or – closer to home – casually broken family structure.
In a Times article (paywall) this week, Rotherham's Labour MP, Denis MacShane, identifies three areas of denial: by the police, social workers and a weak Crown Prosecution Service; by the South Asian community, whose response resembles that of the Catholic church when confronted with systemic child abuse; and by wider society, by ministers (who might want to consider a guardianship procedure for at-risk teens) and a media that treats prostitution more as a career choice than a grim necessity.
Not a bad list – perhaps you can do better? – but it leads to my second worry. Namely that we pile responsibility for sorting out the chaos we create in our own lives on overworked and overstressed professions, some of them understaffed and underpaid too. Never a day passes without the council, social services, harassed teachers or the police getting it in the neck.
It's not that, case by case, they don't deserve to be chided in print or on the Today programme. There are suggestions this week that Britain's tardy adoption practices are finally showing signs of improvement because comparative local authority performance tables are now available, and seem to act as a spur to greater activity.
But public officials bear fearsome burdens for individual human lives – and risk castigation when they get it wrong – which senior executives in an oil company or even a newspaper rarely bear. Nor do they pay such a price when they make mistakes, as they do. Tony Hayward, the ex-BP CEO who mismanaged the politics of BP's Gulf oil spill, is probably doing quite nicely on the conference circuit explaining his mistakes.
Financial cuts need not always mean cuts to frontline services; there are usually better, cheaper ways of doing things. I heard a few heartwarming tales on the Lib Dem conference fringe this week (Torbay seems to have cracked integrated care for the elderly) and expect to hear more at the Labour and Tory conferences.
But frontline services are being cut – I hear that on the fringe too. So more parents who lose control of their kids, for whatever reason, mean more work for hard-pressed public services that should respond more sensitively but may feel, mistakenly but very humanly, that they have got more deserving priorities than truculent teenagers.