Easy Meat: Inside Britain's Grooming Gang Scandal by Peter McLoughlin

Author:Peter McLoughlin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: New English Review Press
Published: 2016-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

5.10 Academic Experts

We wanted to make sure that we were not missing any instances of courageous academics who had used their academic freedom to research and report on the grooming gangs, even when the child-care professionals and the media were too politically correct to do so. On the NSPCC website we found a ‘reading list of key research into child sexual exploitation’, and a glance at the titles of this ‘key research’ is enough to demonstrate how academics and other child protection experts have fundamentally ignored the grooming gangs.189 There are two main academic institutions whose work we can examine to see how much they have done to speak out about the grooming gangs: the International Centre for the Study of Sexually Exploited and Trafficked Young People (Bedfordshire University) and the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science (University of London). If one consults the NSPCC ‘list of key research’, one will see that the bulk of the list is made up of documents from Barnardo’s, Bedfordshire Centre, or the Jill Dando Institute.

It was at the end of 2011 that Sue Jago and Professor Jenny Pearce from Bedfordshire University published research into the failings of Local Safeguarding Children Boards.190 Once again, it seems that it was after the spate of successful prosecutions in 2010, and when CEOP, The Times newspaper and Barnardo’s started to address this hitherto unspoken problem, that the University of Bedfordshire academics also became involved. We have to ask: what research was this centre (or its staff) doing on this subject between 1988 and 2011? We can understand that there are reasons why charities may want to tread within the borders of safety when it comes to political correctness, as bad publicity could affect their funding, and charities can be forgiven for fearing that some pressure groups might be ruthless enforcers of the ideology of political correctness. However, when it comes to academics, here is a group of professionals supposedly guided by truth, not by the ideological dogma of political correctness.

In 2009 Prof. Pearce (Director of this Centre at Bedfordshire University) authored a book on sexual exploitation.191 In that book Prof. Pearce was perfectly capable of describing the phenomenon of ‘localised grooming’, which CEOP went on to supposedly discover two years later. According to Prof. Pearce:

the “grooming model for sexual exploitation”, explained the process whereby an abusive adult entices a young person into becoming dependent upon them. Invariably, this involved the young person believing they are in love with their abuser. The pattern moves through a process where the abuser flatters the young person, giving them attention, accommodation and other gifts. The young person increasingly becomes dependent upon the abuser who invariably isolates them from family and friends and encourages them to become reliant upon drugs and alcohol. The young person is then forced or coerced into swapping or selling sex to raise money for the “boyfriend.”192

This is the form of grooming which the Home Affairs Select Committee claimed was only recognised following the successful convictions in Derbyshire in November 2010.

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