Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

Where did the term “grooming gangs” come from?

The concept & use of the term 'grooming' first emerged in relation to child sexual abuse in late 1970s USA, with growing recognition of child sexual abuse & exploitation perpetrated by 'extrafamilial' acquaintances.

The word 'grooming' has been around for a long time, applied to a wide variety of human behaviours & activities.

But in the context of child sexual abuse, the term generally refers to specific techniques used by some child abusers to gain access to & control over their victims.

The techniques a child sex abuser employs are mostly influenced by the relationship between the offender & the victim.

Although 'acquaintance child sex abusers' are sometimes violent, to avoid discovery, they tend to control their victims primarily through the grooming process.

According to the 2018 article 'The Evolution of Grooming: Concept & Term', between 1975 & 1985, law enforcement in the US became increasingly aware of 'acquaintance offenders' & the special investigative challenges they presented.

calio.org/wp-content/upl…

In the late 1970s, there was growing awareness of & emphasis placed on cases of (sexual) abuse perpetrated by family members, & 'intrafamilial' cases became the focus of study & publications by early experts & scholars in the field.

In 1977 the LAPD established a specialist 'Sexually Exploited Child Unit', to specifically investigate cases in which offenders from outside their family who were not strangers (i.e., acquaintances) sexually exploited & abused children.

Several other US law enforcement agencies soon learned from & copied the specialised work of the LAPD unit.

With growing awareness of what were back then called 'acquaintance offenders' came increased realisation that some of them would gravitate to youth-serving organisations.

Of course, some professionals had recognised the problem of 'acquaintance abuse' much earlier. For example, the 1939 US 'Boys’ Club' handbook discussed the need for their leaders to be “on guard” for certain behaviors by their volunteers that today would be considered grooming.

Throughout the 1980s the term grooming evolved, & spread into more common usage by law enforcement, other professionals, & then by the media & laypersons.

As the term grooming became increasingly popular, it eventually found its way into more publications in the early 1990s.

The first news story I can find which discusses 'sexual grooming' is in the Canadian Press, on June 4th, 1992.

The founder of the Canadian 'International Missing Children's Society' had been sentenced to four months in jail for 'sexual interference' with an 11-year-old boy.

The abuser had "wormed his way into a position of trust with the boy & groomed him toward sexual intimacy by offering presents, taking him on trips & talking about adopting the youngster."

The Judge placed the abuser on two years supervised probation after his release.

Evidence of the Rotherham abuse scandal was first noted in the early 1990s. Care home managers investigated reports that children in their care were being picked up by taxi drivers. From at least 2001, multiple reports passed names of alleged perpetrators to the police & Council.

In the UK, the concept of 'localised grooming', in which 'gangs' 'groom' neighbourhood victims, was not defined until 2010 by the UK Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre.

The term child sexual exploitation (CSE) was first used in 2009 in a Dept for Education document.

Intended to replace the term 'child prostitution', which implies a level of consent, CSE is a form of child sexual abuse in which children are offered something—eg money, drugs, alcohol, food, a place to stay, or even just affection—in exchange for sexual activity.

CSE includes 'online grooming' & 'localised grooming', formerly known as 'on-street grooming'.

'Localised grooming' involves a group of abusers targeting vulnerable children in a public place, offering them sweets, alcohol, drugs or takeaway food etc in exchange for sex.

The targets can include children in the care of the local authority, as in Rotherham.

Adele Gladman & Angie Heal, argued that describing vaginal, oral & anal rape, murder & attempted murder as "exploitation" does not help people understand the seriousness of the crimes.

A news search shows that the term “grooming gangs” was potentially coined & first used in a UK newspaper, by Rupert Murdoch's Sun on January 6, 2011, in an article titled: 'How to spot if your child is victim of a sex gang; UK TRAFFICKING HORROR.'

The Sun article followed the first of a series of articles in Murdoch's Times about "sex gangs", the first on 5th January 2011: "Most convicted offenders of Pakistani heritage - Young girls abused across North & Midlands Revealed: the conspiracy of silence over UK sex gangs".

The claims made initially in the Times about the data, including its generalisability, concerning the ethnic make-up of ill-defined "sex gangs" have since been questioned. That in some areas there was an ethnic dimension is not in question - but the foregrounding of ethnicity is.

Concern over the problem of what were initially called “sex gangs” received a huge boost when on the 10th January 2011, former Home Secretary Jack Straw went on BBC Newsnight & controversially claimed some men of Pakistani origin saw white girls as "easy meat".

Straw said: Pakistanis "are not the only people who commit sexual offences, & overwhelmingly the sex offenders' wings of prisons are full of white sex offenders. But there is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men... who target vulnerable young white girls."

"Young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they're fizzing & popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits & they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically."

"So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care... who they think are easy meat."

Helen Brayley, from UCL's Jill Dando Institute of Security & Crime Science, said people should not draw hasty conclusions.

Ms Brayley, who wrote the first independent academic analysis of child sex trafficking, said: "When you jump in with thinking about race too quickly, you can miss a whole load of other things that are happening in other areas."

"By racially stereotyping this early on without a national scoping project... we don't know what the situation is in other areas... you might be leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy: if people are looking for Asian offenders, they will only find Asian offenders."

The Sun article which first mentions "grooming gangs" states: "WHITE girls are being groomed on the street for sex abuse by Asian gangs." It quotes Sheila Taylor, then of 'Safe & Sound Derby': a charity helping victims of sexual exploitation, but she did not herself use the term.

The Sun claimed its article "reveals the truth about the grooming gangs".

What the article actually revealed was that in 2011, "approximately two thirds of local authorities do not have dedicated services available for the victims of child sexual exploitation".

Somewhat predictably & inevitably, the next news article I can find mentioning "grooming gangs" is in the divisive right-wing billionaire-owned Mail on January 10, 2011.

The Mail's January 10th article followed the controversial comments of Jack Straw, which announced that in the face of the Rotherham revelations, a nationwide investigation was to be launched into "the grooming of vulnerable girls for sex following a string of disturbing cases".

The Mail article headline was "NATIONAL INQUIRY LAUNCHED INTO SEX GROOMING GANGS". "A specialist child abuse unit will head the inquiry into the trend of ruthless men targeting youngsters as young as 12, plying them with drink & drugs."

In June 2011, Sheila Taylor of Safe & Sound Derby & a leading voice on the new area of Child Sexual Exploitation, was quoted in an article in Community Care, the online publication & website which helps social workers stay up-to-date with developments in practice, law, & policy.

A study, conducted by the University College London Jill Dando Institute of Security & Crime Science, which examined 10 years of data using a sample of 552 sexually exploited children in Derby, found that 40% of the victims were also involved in youth offending.

The study found that:

● 40% of child sexual exploitation victims in Derby were involved in offending behaviour.
● 50% of the offending group had committed their first offence by 14 & 75% by 15.
● 70% of offenders re-offended, with one quarter committing 10 or more offences.

“It makes me really angry that young people are prosecuted for the symptoms of child exploitation,” said Sheila Taylor, chief executive of specialist child sexual exploitation organisation Safe & Sound Derby.

This is arguably the REAL scandal of so-called "grooming gangs."

Missing from the swathes of the divisive "grooming gangs" rhetoric is any mention of the woefully inadequate Government funding, resources, & expertise to help identify & to help prevent children from becoming victims of child sexual exploitation & child sexual abuse.

Murdoch's Sun appears to have framed this travesty in the neat racist trope of "grooming gangs."

Despite a Parliamentary debate on 21st June 2011 on "Young Runaways (Sexual Exploitation)", the actual phrase "grooming gangs" wasn't used in parliament until May 21st, 2013.

On 3rd of February, 2021 - ten years after The Sun coined the phrase "grooming gangs", MPs debated ill-defined so-called "Grooming Gangs" in Parliament.

MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi warned of the dangers of spreading misleading falsehoods which are "exploited by the far-right".

Braverman’s new claims about “grooming gangs” go beyond dog whistles & into overt racism. She asserts perpetrators are “almost all British-Pakistani” & reduces victims to “overwhelmingly white girls from disadvantaged or troubled backgrounds”, contradicting Home Office findings.

The Home Office's 2020 report concluded that while “group-based CSE (child sexual exploitation) offenders are most commonly white”, victims come from many backgrounds, & include boys.

Importantly, it found no reliable, generalisable evidence of ethnic disproportionality.

Today, WHITE men involved in the organised grooming & sexual abuse of children are described by the Mail as "being involved in child grooming sex offences", or as being part of a "paedophile RING", whereas NON-WHITE men, doing the EXACT same thing, are part of a "grooming GANG".