ANNOUNCING Baroness Casey’s report on rape gangs on June 16, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: ‘On Friday, seven men were found guilty of the most horrendous crimes in Rochdale . . . they were found guilty of treating teenage girls as sex slaves.’ She went on to say that ‘in the Crime and Policing Bill we are introducing . . . aggravating offences for grooming offenders so their sentences match the severity of their crimes.’
The problem? Neither of those statements is even remotely true.
Although it is exactly what they did, these criminals were not convicted of ‘treating teenage girls as sex slaves’ or sexual slavery and there are no new ‘aggravating offences for grooming offenders’ in the Crime and Policing Bill.
In contravention of the ministerial code, Yvette Cooper has badly misled the House (and the nation) and must urgently correct herself.
So what was she talking about?
In response to the rape gang scandal gaining international attention, Cooper announced in January a new statutory aggravating factor of ‘grooming’. True to her word, clause 64 of the new Crime and Policing Bill will amend the Sentencing Code to require sentencing judges to treat the fact that an offence is aggravated by grooming as an aggravating factor. It is wrong to describe it as an ‘offence’ – it is not. It is an aggravating factor and a gimmick – the legal equivalent of a chocolate teapot that will achieve absolutely nothing.
The truth is that our extant criminal laws are woefully inadequate to reflect the gravity of the ‘grooming gangs’. The depravity of child sexual slavery and enforced child trafficking, and that is exactly what we are dealing with, simply wasn’t contemplated when designing the Sexual Offences Act 2003, a potential reason being our country is unfamiliar with this alien culture.
So why is this ‘new’ aggravating factor deserving of such criticism? Well, for a start, it isn’t really new: the courts already take ‘grooming’ into account when sentencing and, secondly, it is so ill-defined and broad that it will do nothing to improve the intelligence picture. In short, it will do nothing to improve either deficiency.
Let’s take a deeper look at the issues and the outcomes.
Below are the verbatim offences from the sentencing remarks for one of the men from the Oxford child sexual slavery ring, Mohammed Karrar. These are in relation to one victim (‘V’). He was in his 30s and she was aged between 11 and 18 at the time of the offences. If you can, force yourself to read them all: it is very important that you understand the depravity of these crimes but, please be aware, it is highly distressing.
Under 13
- RAPE OF A CHILD under 13 – vaginal specimen
- Using an instrument with intent to procure a miscarriage
- RAPE – anal specimen
- RAPE OF A CHILD under 13 – Vaginal rape by other men who came to the flat
- Assault of a child under 13 – Insertion of handle of baseball bat
- RAPE of a child under 13 – High Wycombe and other places anal rape specimen count
- CONSPIRACY TO RAPE A CHILD under 13 – Agreement with Man B that V be taken to various houses to be raped by various men
- ARRANGING CHILD PROSTITUTION – with Man B
- TRAFFICKING – with Man B 11 – 15.
13 or over
- CONSPIRACY TO RAPE – Spit roasting
- CONSPIRACY TO RAPE – Agreement with Man B that V be taken to various houses and locations
- ARRANGING CHILD PROSTITUTION – 13,14, 15 with Man B
- RAPE – Vaginal specimen
- RAPE – Anal specimen
- Supply controlled drug class A
- RAPE – in 2011 when V 17/18
The sentencing remarks make clear that Mohammed Karrar was prostituting V out to other men for money, including gang rape, and that this happened hundreds of times. When V objected, amongst other things, he beat her over the head with a baseball bat and shoved it inside her.
How would you describe this behaviour? Perhaps you’d agree it is best characterised as a course of activity amounting to child sexual slavery, enforced child prostitution and torture. You may agree that the relevant offence should say so. After all, these would be accurately categorised as ‘crimes against humanity’ as provided under article 7(g) of the Rome Statute of which the UK is a signatory.
The question then becomes: why does the UK government recognise that sexual slavery and enforced prostitution occur in other countries but fail to recognise that individuals from other countries might perpetrate them on British soil?
While these details from the Oxford rape gang case are exceptionally depraved, the pattern is far from unique. None of us at the National Archive for the Survivors of Grooming Gangs was surprised by the news that the recent Rochdale criminal conduct amounted to child sexual slavery. We have now seen enough publicly available sentencing transcripts and reporting by a few fearless journalists to identify a clear typology which generally follows this pattern:
- A man will befriend or make contact with a girl who is normally between the age of 11-15.
- At some point, and using various methods, he will try to convince her to have intercourse with him or attempt to convince her that she is amenable to sexual behaviour.
- Once, in his mind, he has decided she is neither chaste nor wishes to remain so, he will then use the girl as a sex slave. He will start to pimp her out to his community, and may use egregious violence towards her, causing life-long trauma – both physical and emotional – infertility and, in some cases, her death.
The first and second stage are what is often characterised as ‘grooming’. It’s what happens next that the depravity really starts. It is only after the man has convinced himself that the young girl is neither chaste, nor wishes to remain so, that the man begins to treat the young girl, a child, as a sex slave and prostitute her out. To him, as a slave, she is sub-human, and there are no moral repercussions for his mistreatment of her. It is a moral construct so opposed to our own that it is difficult to comprehend but, make no mistake, this is the moral framework in which these predators operate.
This is why our laws fail the victims and why the obvious mischaracterisation of it as ‘grooming’ doesn’t even touch the sides.
What makes Cooper’s claims even worse is that ‘grooming’ is already taken into account by the courts when sentencing.
The Sentencing Guidelines for relevant offences require judges in determining ‘culpability’ to consider whether there was ‘grooming behaviour used against victim’. While not an ‘aggravating factor’, it has exactly the same effect, adding two to three years to the starting point in a case where a defendant has been found guilty of the ‘rape of a child under 13’.
Clause 64 of the Crime and Policing Bill makes no new requirement for a longer sentence – all it does is require the judge to treat an offence as aggravated by ‘grooming’ and state as much. But a judge will, if obeying the Sentencing Guidelines, as he or she must, already take this into account.
So, what will adding a statutory aggravating feature actually do? The answer, it seems, is nothing.
How will ‘grooming’ help the intelligence picture? Like most relevant offences, the courts have interpreted the term ‘grooming’ so broadly that it could apply in a multitude of settings. For example, in R v DP in 2022, the Court of Appeal found that a father who was abusing his own daughter had exhibited ‘grooming behaviour’ towards her. Heinous as his crimes were, they are manifestly of a different typology to what the lay person understands as ‘grooming’.
Indeed, even the explanatory notes to the Crime and Policing Bill say: ‘The statutory aggravating factor will target grooming behaviour and will include (but is not limited to) individuals involved in grooming gangs.’ The government isn’t even trying to hide the fact this isn’t a targeted measure.
And so even where this new aggravated feature is applied, there will be no meaningful improvement of the intelligence picture. It will fail to solely identify these criminal gangs engaged in child sexual slavery and enforced child prostitution as it will inevitably catch an array of behaviours. The intelligence picture will remain blurred.
Instead, the tired path of hiding behind deliberately incomplete data and perverting the course of justice by obfuscating and branding survivors and their advocates as racists will continue.
So there you have it. Not only does the proposed statutory aggravating factor of ‘grooming’ fail to accurately describe the heinous nature of these crimes, it will fail to deliver justice. It will not impose tougher sentences and it will fail to enhance the intelligence picture which is crucial to target this evil.
It is a totally useless gimmick. But this is an inevitable consequence of relying on recommendations from an almost irrelevant inquiry in the shape of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) report.
What really needs to happen is the creation of offences of ‘child sexual slavery’ and ‘enforced child prostitution’ and both should have a mandatory whole-life order. Only then will the offences reflect the reality and the ‘sentences match the severity of their crimes’.
This is why it is imperative that the new statutory inquiry is closely monitored, held to account, and all relevant legal levers deployed by survivors and their advocates to ensure it is targeted, intelligence-led and delivers meaningful outcomes for victims and to prevent this evil from continuing. In addition to ensuring the voices of victims are heard, that is exactly what the team at the National Archive for the Survivors of Grooming Gangs intends to help do.
