The Jay Report: 7 Years to Tell Us Nothing

Seven years in the making, the long-awaited Jay Report was released earlier this month. Doubtless, you heard precious little about it. This is a shame, because the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) concerns not only the negligence of state institutions and public bodies, but also accusations of an establishment cover-up—an issue some might consider newsworthy. Coming in just shy of £187 million, the report will do well to justify its eye-watering budget, particularly when one considers how many times we have been here before. Reports from Rochdale (2013), Rotherham (2014), Telford (2022), and Oldham (2022), all preached apologies and avowed that ‘lessons must be learned.’ I’d bet at least 50 of my genders they have not been.

The basic findings of the report are appalling, as one would expect. I will spare you most of the gory details (the report and its summaries are worth reading if you have time), but I should like to highlight three facts in particular. First, current estimates indicate that 1 in 6 girls and 1 in 20 boys experience child sexual abuse before the age of 16, which the Office for National Statistics equates to 3.1 million adults in England and Wales. Second, conservative approximations suggest there are half a million child victims of sexual abuse per year in Britain. Third, 35% of child sex abuse victims are first abused when they are between the ages of 4 and 7 years old. Even the English language lacks the expressive resources for me to condemn that harshly enough.

Taken as a whole, the UK authorities’ response to historic child sexual abuse bears all the hallmarks of a cover-up. You can argue whether it’s coincidental or coordinated, but you cannot ignore the facts. From the Labour government’s instructing police not to investigate ‘grooming gangs’ to the Conservative Prime Minister’s lack of interest in retrospective investigation; from the extraordinary number of Home Office files that conveniently go AWOL, to the silencing of whistle-blowers and the sacking of MPs who speak out; from the extensive catalogue of police negligence, including connivance through fears of ‘racism’ accusations, backroom deals made with ringleaders, the arrest of victims, the abduction of victims from the police station itself, and perhaps worst: the blunt refusal of police to collect data.

The key issue is demography, and has been for decades. This is a fact widely accepted by politicians while soliciting votes, but post-election, hard-headed recognition miraculously turns into silence. Consider these surprisingly direct comments from Rishi Sunak when vying for the role of Prime Minister earlier this year:

I have two young girls who are nine and eleven. I think for too long, we just haven’t focused on this issue. It’s a horrific crime. A horrific crime affecting not just girls in a few places, it’s far more pervasive across the country than we all realise. We all know the reason that people don’t focus on it is because of political correctness. They are scared of calling out the fact that there is a particular group of people who are perpetuating these crimes. I think that’s wrong, and I want to change it.

Or these from Sajid Javid when made Home Secretary back in 2018:

There will be no no-go areas of inquiry. I will not let cultural or political sensitivities get in the way of understanding the problem and doing something about it. We know that in these recent high profile cases, where people convicted have been disproportionately from a Pakistani background. I’ve instructed my officials to explore the particular contexts and characteristics of these types of gangs.

Suffice it to say, Sunak has been remarkably quiet on the issue of ‘grooming gangs’ since becoming Prime Minister. In Javid’s case, it is also worth noting that despite his pledge, the grooming gang review was ultimately kept secret, under the extraordinarily disingenuous claim that it was ‘not in the public interest.’Something else, clearly not in the public interest, is the collection of accurate data—a clear recommendation from many sources, including the Rotherham Report almost a decade ago:

The issue of race should be tackled as an absolute priority if it is a significant factor in the criminal activity of organised child sexual abuse in the Borough.

Therefore, any subsequent report needs not only to be completely upfront in its prioritising of such data; it must also refuse to accept that such data is unobtainable. Most regrettably, the Jay Report appears to have steered clear of such honesty, with the inquiry almost abandoned several times due to high-profile resignations and chronic failings.

The first choice to head the inquiry, Baroness Butler-Sloss, soon faced calls to quit because her late brother was attorney general in the 1980s. She was replaced by Fiona Woolf, who promptly resigned over accusations of impartiality. Third in to bat was Dame Lowell Goddard, who soon found herself denying reports that she had said Britain has so many paedophiles “because it has so many Asian men.”Perhaps she asked the wrong type of questions, as she was soon ousted and replaced by Lady Jay.

The next flaw in the report is its focus. The inquiry undertook 15 separate investigations—only one of which was the issue of rape gangs, kept deliberately vague by the title ‘child exploitation by organised networks.’ Of course, all forms of child abuse demand to be investigated—but when you commit vast resources to more politically correct perpetrators, such as Cyril Smith and Lord Janner, suspicions can’t help but be raised.

Then there are the areas selected to examine these ‘organised networks.’ If you had set out to choose a series of locations as devoid of Muslim rape gangs as possible, you could hardly have done better. The localities were St. Helens (99% white), Swansea (98% white), Warwickshire (93% white), Bristol (84% white), and Tower Hamlets, which was presumably thrown in by mistake. If the issue of race were being “tackled as an absolute priority,” you would assume from this curious selection that it were white paedophile gangs preying on underage Muslim girls. As Rochdale whistle-blower, Maggie Oliver, has lamented, this investigation was given half the time of the others, victims were ignored, and not one northern town was examined—all in all, a “massive missed opportunity.”

To give an illustration of just how far connivance rather than mere incompetence stretches, consider the differing rates of police failure to record ethnicity. In the case of Tower Hamlets (which incidentally boasts the highest proportion of Muslim residents in England and Wales, at 38%) ethnicity was not recorded for 86% of offenders involved in 147 reports of child sexual exploitation and 14% of 166 victims of child sexual exploitation. In Bristol, however, this drops markedly to just 28% of 137 suspects and 19% of 474 children at risk of child sexual exploitation, unknown or unrecorded.

The most disingenuous part of the report is the explanation it gives for the difficulty drawing conclusions in terms of ‘organised networks’ due to the absence of data:

Data recording the ethnicity of victims and survivors are not easily available. As set out in the Inquiry’s Child Sexual Exploitation by Organised Networks Investigation Report, there were “widespread failures” to record data about the ethnicity of victims in six case study areas, resulting in the police and other agencies being “unable to identify local patterns and trends of child sexual exploitation in respect of ethnicity.”

Data relating to the ethnicity of perpetrators are also lacking. In the Inquiry’s Child Sexual Exploitation by Organised Networks Investigation Report, the six case study areas also failed to record properly the ethnicity of perpetrators:

Many of the high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions have involved groups of men from minority ethnic communities. This has led to polarised debate about whether there is any link between ethnicity and child sexual exploitation networks. Poor or non-existent data collection makes it impossible to know whether any particular ethnic group is over-represented as perpetrators of child sexual exploitation by networks.

Analysing any pattern or trends in respect of the ethnicity of victims and survivors or perpetrators is difficult due to the paucity of this data. As considered further below, the government recognises that current methods of data collection are “inadequate” and that: “More robust data collection on characteristics, as well as further analysis of this data, is therefore needed to better understand offenders and victims because community, cultural, and other factors are clearly relevant to understanding and tackling offending.”

It is simply unacceptable to spend seven years examining the most virulent scourge of our society, and conclude that there are no pieces to connect, because of an absence of data – a priority acknowledged from the get-go. The inquiry had seven years to amass data, data that could have been readily and legitimately demanded of the government, even if it were only the conviction rates—not to mention the wealth of comparative data from Europe where they are less squeamish about such matters.

Among the report’s many recommendations are a Cabinet minister for children, which seems eminently sensible; compensation for victims, which feels distasteful; and more comprehensive data collection—good luck with that! We’ve just kicked the can down the road for another decade.

It’s hard to conclude that the cover-up investigation has been anything other than a cover-up itself. Maybe we’ll get some data by 2030, but don’t bet on it. Perhaps the hate speech laws will be so powerful by then, we won’t even be talking about the little white girls dying in silence. Maybe that’s what everyone involved wants. It gives me no pleasure to say, but the Report is an insult to the victims, past, present, and future, who have to pay for this deceit.

If you want some ‘data’ on the true nature of rape gangs, go and visit any one of hundreds of northern towns across Britain and ask the people: they’ll tell you what our government and their willing accomplices are too cowardly to say.

This piece first appeared in The European Conservative, and is reproduced by kind permission.