The Evil They Chose Not to See

How Britain’s institutions put reputation before children.

Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash

Here’s a test of moral sanity. When you first learned about the grooming-gangs scandal – the organised rape of vulnerable working-class girls in the towns and cities of Britain – did you feel anger and disgust? When you learned of the institutional coverups and obfuscations, still unaccounted for, did that anger deepen? If so, you’ve already grasped the central truth of this story.

The horror of the grooming gangs is not just in the crimes themselves, but in the evasions and euphemisms deployed by the political class – its instinct for process over principle, reputation over truth – allowing these crimes to continue, even to this day. What happened to those girls wasn’t a failure of the system. It was the system working exactly as intended: protecting institutions, not children.

Those who govern us like to pretend this is about the failure of information. It isn’t. It’s a failure of will. Testimonies were waiting to be acted on. Frontline workers waved red flags. As far back as 2006, Jon Wedger submitted a list of 50 girls being groomed and sexually abused in London. The former Metropolitan Police officer provided car registration numbers, dates, and locations. He was told to back off by social services because he was generating “extra work” – a pattern of behaviour which has come to define this whole sordid affair.

This is modern Britain, a country run by a managerial class made up of officials, comms teams, and risk managers whose first instinct is to protect the institution and, by extension, themselves. Pay close enough attention, and you will detect the same vocabulary, the same cadences in every utterance. They are fluent in the language of obfuscation and euphemism – practically a job requirement – and will speak of “community cohesion” while wearing a lanyard like a medal. They will hold a “listening circle”, but at that very moment, a young girl is being driven to a room somewhere with a stained mattress and a line of customers.

The mechanics

How did we get here? What mechanisms and pathologies make all of this possible? I have a few ideas.

First, moral exhibitionism. Status is everything; none of us is immune. But for the managerial class, status is not won through the accumulation of wealth or fame but in public displays of so-called empathy. Institutions have learned to perform virtue rather than exercise it. When it comes to the issue of grooming gangs, genuine empathy would galvanise action. Girls would be protected, and abusers would be quick to face justice. But this would require specific, targeted, and often “divisive” action because it would identify certain patterns and spotlight uncomfortable truths.

Performed compassion, on the other hand, is soothing, noncommital and vague. It comes dressed in soothing banalities like “complex safeguarding” and “multi-agency partnership working”. These phrases are worse than meaningless, dissolving the sharp edges of responsibility in a warm bath of “we’re all very concerned”.

Second, motivated blindness. When the cost of seeing what’s in front of your nose is high, people stop seeing. Why? Because in modern Britain, being called a bigot or a racist can end a career faster than failing to protect a child. Acknowledging patterns in offender groups means saying the unsayable. Much safer to lean on euphemisms, soften the language and deflect. What’s more, stating the obvious means admitting historic failure, and this threatens careers. So institutions train themselves to avoid taking action. If you don’t record the relevant facts, you won’t have to act on them. If you broaden the remit, the original crime disappears into the fog. This is the very definition of strategic incompetence.

Third, risk inversion. In a healthy system, the risk of ignoring a credible allegation is greater than the risk of investigating it. In Britain, the reverse is true.

All the evidence suggests that the fastest route to promotion is to “calm things down”, to produce an inscrutable report nobody reads, but the executive summary of which states “no evidence of systemic issues at this time”. Go against the grain and you’re “escalatory”. Try to save a child and you’re “making trouble”. Conversely, the person who issues a neutral statement about “ongoing work with partners” is leadership material.

Fourth, bureaucratic ambiguity. Bureaucracies thrive on situations where no one can be held accountable, everything is “complex,” and every decision requires a committee. Clarity is the enemy of bureaucracy because it names things. It says: this is happening to these children in these places by these men, and this is what will happen if we don’t put a stop to it. Likewise, moral clarity upends bureaucratic complacency, clears the fog of moral confusion, and draws the curtain on the performance of virtue. That is why conscious ambiguity above all defines the mindset of the managerial class, sustaining the performance indefinitely.

The bargains

Notice the psychological bargains that follow.

The bargain with language: The renaming of things until the truth stops making a scene. And so “rape” becomes “exploitation”, “gang” becomes “network” and “victim” becomes “service user”. Discussion of the crimes and their victims quietly moves from the moral realm to an administrative one. Empathy becomes a set of practical concerns – why weren’t the girls at school, were they from poor backgrounds – and compassion is measured by spreadsheet.

The bargain with time: Justice gets delayed in the name of getting it right. Committees proliferate, and additional committees are established to oversee them. Politicians declare that a new review will review the previous reviews. Others promise to “listen and learn”, a phrase that has come to mean the opposite. Delay is not an unwelcome symptom of dealing with a complex matter but a cure for indecision.

The bargain with equality: The managerial class pretends that the only ethically acceptable path is absolute blindness to relevant differences. They confuse prejudice (irrational hatred) with pattern recognition (empirical observation) and congratulate themselves for their refusal to describe reality as it appears. In doing so, the people who should be the first line of defence against abuse quietly tell certain children that they are acceptable losses in a reputational war.

Underlying all these failures is a deeper fear: the fear of judgment. The fear that they will have to say publicly what every decent person knows privately: that for years, the comfort of adults was weighed against the bodies of children, and the first took precedence. Britain’s class of professional caretakers cannot bear such a heavy sentence, and so they do what they do best: convert shame into process.

The reckoning

What would moral seriousness sound like?

It sounds like this: “We made a terrible error. Here’s what happened, here are names, here are consequences, here’s what changes today”. Moral evasion, on the other hand, sounds like this: “We recognise multiple intersecting factors and will convene a partnership forum to explore them”. One of these saves girls. The other saves face.

No inquiry into this scandal will matter unless it starts by naming what is in front of us, without equivocation or cowardice. An effective inquiry would install powerful incentives so that failing to act ends careers rather than saves them. It would banish PR from the first 48 hours of any allegation. It might rid us of PR altogether, one of the most harmful strands in the fabric of deceit and evasion. It would reject the sanitising fictions that children are problems to be managed and that British-Pakistani rape gangs who prey on them are “offenders of Asian heritage”. Euphemism would be treated as evidence of guilt.

None of this requires a cultural revolution – only plain honesty. It’s about a state of mind, one that puts conscience above reputation, plain truths above Orwellian newspeak and finally the courage and humility to say: We looked away because it suited us to look away. And then, finally, to stop.

There is a line you cannot cross and still call yourself civilised. It’s a line that puts vulnerable children before diversity targets. It’s drawn at the point where the wicked prey on the weak, and so-called guardians look away to protect themselves.

Britain, through its managerial class, has drifted to the other side of that line. We must do everything in our power to bring it back.

Until then, the grim show goes on. Safeguarding professionals will arrive with binders, lanyards swinging in the pretence of action. Someone will light a scented candle for “awareness”. Another will call for a new review and promise a fresh start.

And while all this is going on, somewhere, a girl will sit on the edge of a bed, learning in the worst possible way what kind of country we have become.

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