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“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN,” Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, tweeted on 3 January this year. He was accusing the prime minister of failing, as director of public prosecutions, to tackle issues with grooming and child exploitation that go back several decades. A flurry of tweets reignited public interest in the case, something that has been covered for 30 years by the journalist and documentarian Anna Hall, who revisits her work this week for the Channel 4 documentary Groomed: A National Scandal.
The grooming scandal in Britain – which is often perceived as activities in Rotherham between the 1980s and 2013, but was, as this film shows, more widespread – is a complex issue. It crosses racial lines – the perpetrators were largely British-Pakistani, the victims often white – and involved myriad failures that allowed the abuse to go unchecked. Councils, social workers, the police, the entire criminal justice system, all have been scrutinised, and criticised, in the wake of events. It is, in short, a tragedy that is hard to do justice to in little over an hour. “This is the story of five women,” Hall announces at the outset, privileging, instead, the voices of victims like Chantelle and Jade, who appear on camera to deliver gruelling testimony about the rape and exploitation they suffered. This victim-centric account is clearly the way to go with a subject so frequently inflamed for political gain.
Yet as much as Hall wants to platform these women – who are startling, both in their frankness and their transparent vulnerability – the film cannot contextualise their stories without diving into the labyrinthine tale of evil being perpetrated and then (largely) gotten away with. “They’re not gonna stop,” one of the victims tells Hall. “It’s actually organised crime.” The tendrils of what happened have affected many of the interviewees – from Maggie Oliver, a police officer turned whistleblower, to Marlon West, whose daughter was groomed and abused in Manchester – who appear in the film. It necessarily dilutes the rawness of the five women who courageously take to the camera (some are portrayed, facially, by actors; others have waived their anonymity entirely), but provides a pathway through this tricky tale.
And it is tricky. “This is a film I hoped I’d never have to make,” Hall’s low-key narration informs us. It is a stark contrast to the gleeful, propagandising tone employed by Musk, and other far-right groups, as the story has resurfaced in recent months. This much has always been the case: the film shows the campaigns for justice being hijacked, in the 2010s, by groups like the BNP and EDL. “I wanted to make another film that tackles the issue of race head on,” Hall claims. And so even though the film disclaims that the majority of child abuse happens in the home and the majority of perpetrators are white, Groomed doesn’t shy away from the racial dynamic of this case. In fact, it could go further. It teases an understanding about cultural concerns within the British-Pakistani community (the film occasionally elides the British half of this, a possible misstep given how much of the abuse was perpetrated by second-generation immigrants), yet the foregrounding of victims means questions about the offenders get sidelined.
It is a delicacy that is, perhaps, born out of the incendiary nature of this issue. “Rotherham exploded,” a Yorkshire local confides, as the story becomes a global cause celebre. “My little town became world news.” Hall feels that the victims have become a “political football”, and yet the commissioning of this documentary also feels calculated. It is clear that grooming gangs are still in operation, but the salience of this issue has been raised by groups propagating aggressive nativism. Is this a chance for the women – the victims – to finally be heard with their own voices? Or is this a root-and-branch examination of political and judicial failings?
In the end, it’s a bit of both. The first-person testimony is harrowing but urgent. A broadcaster with more confidence in their audience being able to contextualise that information might’ve done something more radical, and allowed these women to hold the screen from start to finish. But as Groomed: A National Scandal suggests in its title, this issue has transcended the relative simplicity of that dynamic. Fraught with political complexity, this film cannot quite decide whether it wants to provoke or placate.
