By PAT PRENTICE

Many years ago, an in-law came from a northern city with her husband to visit me in London. As we drove past a line-up of mainly attractive mini-skirted young women in Richmond, her tutting from the back seat became audible.

 

I asked what was wrong and she said she had heard about London and what went on in Soho, and the police should do something to stamp out such obvious vice.

 

We had just passed a bus queue!

 

She was a true English girl with an impressive university degree — and anyway, prostitution was not illegal, although soliciting was.

 

Either way, there is no doubt that had she the power, her misread observations would have led to her clamping down on a group of prettily-attired secretaries on their way home after a day at the office.

 

Now imagine an immigrant from a culture where life was dominated by customs that kept women covered up, uneducated, forbidden from leaving their homes alone, and excluded from what Western women would regard as normal life.

 

Where, in some notably notorious cases, females who had been raped were publicly stoned to death for adultery. Where the mere hint of female flesh was deemed enough to tempt a man to sacrilegious sin. Where, in many cases, females were treated as chattels.

 

How would they have interpreted such an assembly?

 

Then picture a teenage girl, possibly — but not necessarily — wayward and distanced from her parents, or in a care home porous to drugs. A lost child so desperate for friendship and security that she pined in her short-skirted night meanderings for safety and reassurance and misguidedly clung to anyone appearing to offer comfort.

 

In a country so tolerant that most of its natives were welcoming and willing to accommodate an alien culture — that clearly discriminated against women — in case they were accused of being racists.

 

Where migrants, determinedly unbriefed about the conventions of their newly-chosen home, must have thought they had arrived in Sodom or Gomorrah, among sirens deservedly available to be abused.

 

Then picture a British society still influenced by a class system where an accent alone could prevent social advancement, and poverty was acknowledged as a mark of inferiority. A class largely shunned and neglected by so-called respectable people.

 

With blind-eyed politicians willing to ignore realities to ingratiate themselves with new voters; liberal social workers simperingly fawning to the proclivities of groups often with a stubbornly poor grasp of their newly-chosen communities and language — and police who chose to turn a blind eye to obvious crimes, possibly for social, political, or statistical reasons — or institutional uniform laziness.

 

For example, the Met Bobby who, when I informed him that there was a drug problem on a Greenwich estate, said there wasn't. His super had told him not to go there — so, statistically, there wasn't a problem.

 

Or the good people chatting in a Wapping butcher's shop who were sad one day when a very young girl they knew had to marry, and so would no longer be allowed to mix in their company or watch television.

 

They respected her religion, and considerately would not intrude upon her betrothed's edicts.

 

When all that is considered, it should not be too hard for a responsible authority to recognise and devise solutions to an issue that is once again being highlighted, many years after a courageous journalist struggled to expose the problem of grooming gangs.

 

Now, the man who defied adversity and allegations of racism and worse in his devotion to exposing the truth for The Times, is suggesting that a detailed examination of what germinated such behaviour could be undertaken.

 

The man, Andrew Norfolk, has now retired. Perhaps, given his lone campaign to reveal the scandal in the face of intimidating authority, he should be the one to lead such an inquiry.

 

He has already proven his worth, where the usual culprits of authority have so obviously demonstrated that they have little value.

 

© Pat Prentice

 

6 February 2025