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The political “tug-of-war with vulnerable women” abused by grooming gangs must stop ahead of a new national inquiry into the crimes, survivors have told the Guardian.
Holly Archer and Scarlett Jones, two survivors who played a key role in a “gold-standard” local inquiry into the crime in Telford, have urged politicians and those without experience of abuse to allow women to shape the investigation.
“We have to put politics aside when it comes to child sexual exploitation, we have to stop this tug-of-war with vulnerable women,” said Archer, author of I Never Gave My Consent: A Schoolgirl’s Life Inside the Telford Sex Ring.
“There are so many voices that need to be heard. There’s some voices, though, that need to step away,” she said. “We can do it, let us do it – we don’t need you to speak on our behalf.”
Jones, who works with Archer at the Holly Project, a support service helping survivors of child sexual exploitation (CSE) and their families, added: “There are so many people out there at this moment exploiting the exploited – it’s happening all the time.”
The government announced on Monday that police would collect ethnicity data for all cases of child sexual abuse, after a report from Louise Casey found evidence of “over-representation” of Asian and Pakistani heritage men among suspects in local data – collected in Greater Manchester, West and South Yorkshire.
But she also urged the public to “keep calm” over the ethnicity of grooming gang offenders, saying police data from one region suggested that the race of child abuse suspects was proportional with the local population.
Archer, who founded the Holly Project, said the collection of ethnicity data of offenders had to improve but also urged those discussing child sexual exploitation not to rely on stereotypes surrounding perpetrators of CSE or their victims. While she was groomed from the age of 14 by men of Pakistani origin, the majority of men who went on to “buy” her and rape her as a child were Chinese.
Jones, author of Just a Girl, said she was first abused within her own white family, she was then enticed into a grooming gang.
“Nobody wants to know about that, because that doesn’t meet their narrative,” said Archer. “You’re told that you’re just not relevant, that it didn’t really happen to you anyway. You’re a liar. You’re a fake person.”
Archer said she no longer used social media after facing threats. “I’ve been called a paedophile myself, a paedophile enabler, a grooming gang supporter. They said they hope my daughter gets raped. It’s just constant.”
She also described being given a leaflet by the far-right Britain First political movement in Telford after her book was published in 2016. “They handed me leaflets that had quotes from my own book in them,” she said. “They didn’t know it was me, and they were telling me I was very pro what they were doing. It was insane.”
Archer and Jones, who both use pseudonyms and are not pictured to protect themselves and their families, both welcomed the recommendations made by Casey, particularly the involvement of the National Crime Agency (NCA), which will lead a national push to reopen historic group-based child sexual abuse cases.
All well as making sure the inquiry was victim-led, it also had to establish a definition for child sexual exploitation, which could differ in different agencies and police forces, said the women.
The inquiry will see five existing local inquiries into grooming gangs coordinated by an independent commission with full statutory inquiry powers, which Archer said would provide much-needed accountability. “It is really important that the localised aspect is not lost,” she said.
In Telford, where a three-year independent inquiry into the scale of CSE concluded in 2022 that hundreds of children were sexually exploited over decades, victims had been consulted from the beginning, added Jones. Survivors, including the Holly Project, then helped the council to implement changes.
“At a national level, I don’t want them to lose the part where survivors are actually the people telling them what needs to be done,” she said.
The pair are both critical of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse lead by Prof Alexis Jay, which Jones described as “absolutely pointless”.
“Years later, nothing has been done, none of the recommendations have been implemented,” she said. “The worry is that that is what will happen again.”
Above all, the pair want to see a shift in the national conversation so that children are always treated as victims, and not seen – as they were – as complicit in their own abuse. “We need one statutory procedure that says, if a child is suspected to be at risk of exploitation, we are going to wrap care around them and their family to make sure that they are safe,” said Archer. “We need survivors to feel safe enough just to live their life, be happy and know that they’re worth having that happiness.”
