The Grooming Gangs Scandal is the Tip of the Iceberg of Public Sector Failure

It has been over 10 years since the publication of the Independent Inquiry into organised Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE), also known as the Jay Report, carried out by gangs of mainly Pakistani heritage men in the borough of Rotherham. The Jay report estimated that over 1,400 children and young people, predominantly female and white British, were victims of the gangs and failed by a range of public services including the police, social workers and local councils. This scandal shares similar features to other public sector failures but also has its own unique factors which are worthy of further analysis.

Concurrent themes were found in the Jay Report and the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust investigations of 2010 and 2013 into excess mortality rates at the hospital. Crucial to understanding both is the role that new managerialism played especially in relation to performance management targets. Essentially, frontline services were redirected to meet these targets and frontline staff faced resource cuts and managerial pressure to prioritise organisational goals rather than serve their client group. Police officers were directed to solve car crime and burglary, which counted towards targets, instead of CSE which did not. Meanwhile, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) declined to take forward prosecutions of CSE because in an adversarial court system, victims that have been repeatedly drugged, traumatised and intimidated did not make effective prosecutorial witnesses.

Similarly, at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust where hundreds of patients suffered poor care and neglect, frontline staff particularly in the Emergency Department (ED) were bullied and coerced into prioritising the four-hour admission or discharge target rather than deliver effective care. The NHS trust board, which did not include a single registered health professional, cut frontline resources including nursing staff and the vital equipment they relied upon to dangerous levels and tasked non-clinical receptionists to carry out triage of patients – a role that should be conducted by experienced nurses with additional training.

New managerialism also fostered bullying cultures and saw whistleblowers intimidated as the status of bureaucrats and non-professional managers was elevated because of their role in the production and curation of quantitative evidence. This led to the ‘McDonaldisation’ of policing, nursing and social work and saw professionals’ role become ever more fragmented and task focused, eroding their professional autonomy, creativity, discretion and compassion. In the clutches of bureaucratised public services, those in need of care were put at greater risk of dehumanisation. The traumatised victim of CSE who required holistic care and support, as well as protection from further intimidation and abuse, is blamed by police officers and social workers for ‘putting themselves at risk’ or ‘consenting to their own abuse’. The patient suffering from dementia lying in an unchanged bed becomes further dehumanised through the failure to deliver the fundamentals of care by exhausted and demoralised nurses.

However, unique to the scandal of CSE is the attempts to silence witnesses, whistleblowers, journalists and politicians to hide away the failures of multiculturalism and protect political power bases. At Rotherham efforts were made, and were largely successful, in undermining Risky Business, an independent organisation which advocated on behalf of and supported victims but was later brought under local authority control.

What perhaps has received little attention is the vulnerability of white British families in a modern high trust society, according to Giddens’s sociologically inspired definition of trust. The Pakistani heritage community has more in common with pre-modern societies based on kinship relations, local community ties, religious faith and tradition compared to white British society based on personal relationships, abstract systems and a future-oriented perspective. This enabled abusers to use their family networks, including children enrolled in local schools and older men working in taxi services, restaurants and public services, to identify, target and abuse their victims. Meanwhile, white British families placed their trust in public servants such as police officers and social workers for protection but when these failed, they were left uniquely vulnerable. Bauman explained how modern citizens, who had given up the right to use violence in their course of their daily affairs, were uniquely vulnerable when the state turned its violence against them. The Jay Report detailed how one family left the U.K. because they had no confidence that the local authorities would protect their child who was being repeatedly targeted by gangs.

A discussion needs to be had about the continued atomisation of white British society and the destruction of the family, including marriage and communities, which has such profound implications for the well-being of children and resilience to external threats. Social workers used the wrong model of child protection at Rotherham, based on familiar patterns of abuse, and removed children from the protective environment of the family and placed them in residential accommodation. This accommodation had been infiltrated already by perpetrators and consequently estrangement from family became a feature of this grooming strategy, along with intoxication through drugs, violent threats and intimidation and trafficking.

Since these scandals came to public attention, little has been done to prevent further harm to the public because there has been no accountability for failings that implicated all the regulatory bodies involved with the protection of the public as well as political leaders. Consequently, highly ranking professionals, senior leaders and politicians continue to oversee further public scandals such as the Post Office miscarriage of justice and the COVID-19 pandemic response. There is now a profound disconnect between democratically-elected politicians, who continue to fail upwards, and the public, leading to the destruction of a previously high trust society. Moreover, until the problem of ‘immoral authority’ is addressed, further scandals associated with multiculturalism, new managerialism and pharmaceutical egress will emerge, and the continued atomisation of our society will leave us and our children more vulnerable to abuse of all kinds.

Dr. Rowena Slope is a Senior Lecturer in Adult Nursing at Bournemouth University and author of Corporate Totalitarianism: Freedom, Power and Technology in the Modern Era and Care in the Iron Cage: A Weberian Analysis of Failings in Care. Subscribe to her Substack.