“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.
