I don’t need to be told by Elon Musk that the UK has blood on its hands – I know it

My whole career as a journalist has been steeped in the issue of child sexual abuse. I don’t need to be told by Elon Musk that the UK has blood on its hands – I know it. I felt the horror first time round with Rotherham. And more than a decade on, I am neither reliant on hindsight, hypocrisy nor flagrant political opportunism to relive how that damning exposure felt at the time.

From Cleveland through to the so-called ‘satanic child abuse scandal’, from Nottingham, Orkney, Ayrshire and to all the individual bedrooms of anonymous homes where unspeakable things went on behind the charade of everyday life, child sexual abuse and exploitation is the scourge of a nation that considers itself child-friendly. I have never shied away from wanting to expose that, nor stopped asking why we don’t actually know the scale of it; its whys and wherefores; or even how to properly deal with it.

The extent and kinds of deprivation, so pervasive that it seeped into body and soul, that I witnessed in the late 1980s, 90s and 2000s as I reported on child abuse rings, where children were reportedly passed around like playthings, will never leave me. Children were left to become feral by parents who themselves had known no real parenting. Drugs and alcohol were rife, while food was rationed, and love and real affection was in short supply. 

Children were simply collateral damage of a broken society where their value was transient, transactional, and they took attention and gifts where they could find them. Vulnerable kids were easy pickings for predators , and easily dismissed by those in positions of care. But somehow, along the way, they were blamed for their own harms. Girls as young as ten and 11 were seen as ‘asking for it’, ‘slags’, and ‘easy meat’. And that attitude still prevails. 

When I did shifts in a children’s home in Glasgow, it was seemingly accepted as an inevitable fact of circumstance that the older men that sat outside in cars and offered free fags and a ride into town to the young girls, were then pimping them out to men in supermarket car parks for the price of a pint. 

A hospitalised anorexic teenager, so furious with life that she was willing to end it, confided in me that she couldn’t physically eat because from being a small child, her father would ejaculate in her mouth before offering a meal as a ‘reward’. 

The little girl, who followed me around like a shadow, who only stuck to me like glue because she was avoiding being left alone with a dad that would force himself on her whenever he got the opportunity and felt the inclination.  

And even today, after all the formal reports and inquiries, and the horrible facts have been laid bare, there appears to be no real panic when a ‘looked after’ – there’s an oxymoron – young person fails to return to a residential unit at night. Promiscuity is just assumed. These kids are considered damaged goods. And if you tell a child they are only good for one thing, they start to believe it.

These are the ghosts that haunt me. I didn’t need Musk to remind me of that. But I am personally, politically, and morally challenged by the fact that it has taken a fact-starved American billionaire, with questionable motives, to push the UK Ggovernment into implementing just one of the 20 safeguards recommended over two years ago, to a then Tory-led government, by Alexis Jay who headed a national independent inquiry into child sexual abuse and exploitation spanning decades, building on the inquiry she had already done in Rotherham almost ten years before.

Jay’s unflinching 2014 report spoke of how girls as young as 11 were raped, trafficked, abducted, beaten and intimidated, predominantly by men of Pakistani heritage in Rotherham who gave the girls drink and drugs and passed them around like toys to be discarded.  

Jay highlighted the fact that fears of being called out for racism prevented proper investigations and that, inevitably, most of the girls were already known to the social services.

And on page 75 – for those who separate fact from fiction – Jay records how the DPP, one Keir Starmer, issued revised guidelines in the wake of these horrors – 11 in all – that would, for future investigations, preclude bias, such as taking into account young girls being on drink, drugs or dressing in a certain way, or not having put up a fight. These were seminal changes for the good and they led to convictions.

So, yes, Musk is shocked when reading the court transcripts from Rotherham and seeing the levels of depravity inflicted. Anyone would be. But men who abuse children do depraved things. There is nothing new in that. What is new is Musk’s first-time exposure to it which is surprising given the salacious content on his own social media platform.

There was, is, a very tangible problem with some Muslim men involved in these rape gangs in some parts of the country. There’s no denying that. But then, there is a significant problem with all men with a prurient interest in children. It cuts across faith, class, institutions and ethnicity. But where race or organised religion is an aggravator in preventing justice being done, then it is not feeding into the far-right to express concern as to why that is the case or to want to know the facts. It is lazy of politicians on the left to say otherwise.

I also question the motivation of those fair-weather Tories, now so aerated with their demands for another inquiry, but who were silent on the day Jay reported her findings directly to them in 2022, preoccupied, as they were, by the resignation of Liz Truss. These are the same right-wingers who now talk up a scandal around so-called grooming gangs, which is so clearly distilled through the prism of a race to the bottom on immigration and what has been described as “alien cultures”, rather than out of any real concern for the victims whose voices they repeatedly ignored.

And while it is dubious, but fine, for Musk to be outraged by what is a scandal, I don’t believe his ire has anything to do with the pain that working-class, white girls endured. This man preaches about the immorality of British politicians while operating a social media platform that allows children to access porn, and helps to legitimise all manner of depravity inflicted on women. If Musk truly wants to do something about child sexual abuse, then let him use his platform for good and use some of his great wealth to help survivors rebuild their lives, which is where all our efforts should be focused.