Spare a thought for family
tainted by Andrew
Libby Purves
Page 23
Cultural squeamishness lets crime thrive
Hyper-sensitivity about race and religion has become a barrier to the investigation of appalling abuses and extremism
Comment
Abedi went on to detonate a
rucksack bomb that killed 22 people
and injured hundreds more.
The guard told the public inquiry
why he had not confronted Abedi. “I
did not want people to think I am
stereotyping him because of his
race,” he said. “I was scared of being
wrong and being branded a racist if I
got it wrong and would have got into
trouble. It made me hesitant... I just
had a bad feeling about him but did
not have anything to justify that.”
Schooled to view life through the
prism of structural racism, sexism,
Islamophobia and homophobia, many
of those who work on Britain’s front
line are now primed to see bigotry
wherever they look, to question their
own motivations to a degree that is
absurd, to avoid the truth in a way
that is harmful. It was right for the
pendulum to swing away from the
crass, casual bigotry of decades past
but it has now swung too far in the
other direction, to a level of hyper-
sensitivity that serves none of us.
There is no easy way to unpick the
thinking that has been threaded
through the public sector over
decades — no minister can decree an
outbreak of sense — but it is time
there were more concerted attempts
to address the problem and the fear
that underpins it. Staff training must
instruct police officers and social
workers to use their own judgment
rather than falling back on the
dictates of political correctness. The
bar of proof for career-ruining
racism claims must be raised higher
than a mere accusation or “feeling”
on the part of an accuser.
And ultimately, we will need
millions of small acts of courage
from those willing to reject cultural
squeamishness, from those brave
enough to confront the truth,
however inconvenient or
uncomfortable that may be.“racist” stalks those working across
the public sector, in social services and
schools, local government and central,
police forces and prisons.
A 2016 report into Islamist
extremism in Britain’s jails found that
staff were reluctant to tackle
extremists in case they were labelled
as racist. Officers believed that they
would be “hung out to dry” and
inmates aware of this anxiety were
“routinely” threatening staff with
discrimination claims.
Such fears are not reserved for the
public sector, of course. Perhaps the
most stark and direct example of the
fallout from cultural squeamishness
was heard in evidence to the inquiry
into the Manchester Arena bombing.
An 18-year-old security guard
patrolling the venue that night saw a
young Asian man who was “fidgety”
and acting in a “dodgy” way. SalmanStar Hobson was 16 months old when
she was killed by her mother’s partnerpupil at an Islamic school spoke of
being forced to squat for long periods
for failing to learn verses of the
Quran. The former pupil of an ultra-
Orthodox Jewish institution in
London spoke to The Times recently
about the beatings he had endured at
the hands of “teachers” wielding
kitchen implements and belts.
The Department for Education has
been promising to tackle this for years
but change is a long time coming.
Ofsted inspectors still can’t go into
these schools or gather evidence and
so the number of prosecutions is
very low. Could cultural
squeamishness be at play here? Ask
yourself how long an illegal Christian
school that meted out beatings
would be allowed to stay open and
the conclusion can only be “yes”.
Time and again cultural
squeamishness in the public sector
leads to failure or tragedy. It was
there two decades ago in the case of
Victoria Climbié, who suffered
unspeakable torture despite being
known by several agencies. During
the public inquiry into her death
witnesses implied that poor practice
by black social workers went
unchallenged by colleagues for fear
that highlighting their incompetence
would be perceived as racism.
A similar kind of hyper-sensitivity
may have failed Star Hobson, the 16-
month-old girl killed in 2020 by her
mother’s partner Savannah Brockhill.
Concerned relatives asked Bradford
social services to intervene but their
pleas were dismissed as “malicious”,
motivated by racism and homophobia
(the “racism” referred to Brockhill’s
Traveller background). Star’s great-
grandfather, David Fawcett, who
raised the alarm, said that when social
workers visited the flat, he and his wife
were dismissed as “troublemakers
who disliked Gypsies and lesbians”.
Fear of the career-ending label of‘L
essons will be learnt”. If I
could choose one phrase
of officialese to sink into
cement boots and chuck
in the North Sea, it would
be this one. How often did we hear it
after the Jay Report of 2014, which
exposed the mass sexual exploitation
of children in Rotherham?
A reminder of the scale and
savagery of those crimes — 1,400
girls were abused and raped, children
were doused in petrol and told that
they might be set alight, threatened
at the point of a gun, made to
witness violent gang rapes and
warned they would face the same
horror if they told anyone.
Their abusers got away with it for
years, partly because of what we
might call cultural squeamishness.
Local police officers, social workers
and council officials were worried
about acknowledging that the vast
majority of offenders were of
Pakistani descent and thus opening
themselves up to charges of racism.
In a confidential council report
written in 2010, there was the
warning that such crimes had
“cultural characteristics” and involved
“sensitivities of ethnicity with
potential to endanger the harmony
of community relationships”. Jargon-
coated cowardice.
Still, lessons would be learnt, eh?
Apparently not. Last week The Times
investigations team revealed that in
2019 — five years after the Jay report
— South Yorkshire police were still
not routinely recording the ethnicities
of suspected child abusers. In the
Rotherham district, the ethnicity of
67 per cent of suspects went
unrecorded. Meanwhile, there are
reports that child sexual exploitation
is rife in the town. Internal
intelligence produced by the force in
2019 revealed that Rotherham was
still seen as a “hotspot” for abuse.
Last November, a group of local
Conservative councillors alleged that
this was a continuing problem, with
girls being sold for sex from
takeaways and petrol stations.
I don’t suggest that noting suspects’
ethnicity would be some magic bullet
that would solve these crimes. But the
fact that South Yorkshire police are
still reluctant to record this
information suggests a continuing
cultural squeamishness that stands
as an obstacle to clarity, to truth-
seeking, to catching the perpetrators
of these crimes or preventing them
from happening in the first place.
This hyper-sensitivity has infectedswathes of the public sector. There
was the whiff of it in another story
last week, about unregistered and
illegal schools. According to the
Ofsted director charged with
clamping down on these schools, the
hundreds we know about are “only
the tip of the iceberg”.
The Independent Inquiry into
Child Sexual Abuse has estimated
that there are potentially 250,000
children in England and Wales
receiving education in supplementary
schools with a faith focus. The fact
that they can’t be inspected like
regular schools makes some of them
a haven for abuse. Last week a formerMany of those on the
front line are now
primed to see bigotry
Clare
Fo ge s@clarefoges
the times | Monday January 3 2022 21