Show caption Illustration by Nate Kitch Opinion Victims of child abuse gangs are the first to suffer – and the last to get our attention Sonia Sodha The focus on race and religion distracts from the task of making sure crimes such as those uncovered in Newcastle never happen again Thu 10 Aug 2017 17.32 BST Share on Facebook

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If there’s one question we owe it to the victims of the Newcastle child abuse gang to ask, it’s how on earth this type of organised child sexual abuse is still happening. It’s a horrific, yet tragically familiar, story that has played itself out in every corner of the country, from Rotherham and Rochdale to Oxford and Bristol. Each time there is a new string of convictions or another independent inquiry, “never again” trips so easily off our tongues. But it seems to continue to elude us.

Yet that’s so rarely the question that is asked first. Instead, one fact tends to be elevated above all others: that this so often appears to be a crime perpetrated by gangs of non-white men against vulnerable white girls. We lament the fact that we can’t talk about this, even as the argument about whether ethnicity is the main driver dominates the ensuing media debate. Yet by endlessly raking over this second-order question – is race or religion a factor? – we never seem to make any progress on the first-order issue: how do we prevent this from happening again?

Prevention requires developing an understanding of the root causes of this type of child sexual abuse. That means not just how these crimes get overlooked by the authorities, but how and why they are perpetrated in the first place. This doesn’t mean adopting the tactics of the far right: selectively deploying the facts to imply there is some inevitable link between being a Muslim man and committing these crimes, in order to stoke Islamophobia. But neither does it mean asserting that culture or faith play no part in the story, when we simply don’t have the evidence to make that claim.

Thanks to the many independent reports into child sexual abuse in various places, we know that the disgustingly prejudiced attitudes towards the vulnerable girls who are abused are not limited to the perpetrators of these heinous crimes. In Rotherham, Alexis Jay’s report reveals police officers believed children as young as 11 capable of having consensual sex with groups of men three times their age. The police arrested young girls found in the company of older men in strange flats for drunk-and-disorderly behaviour, leaving the perpetrators free to continue their abuse. In Rochdale, three council employees expressed the view that the victims were “making choices”, as if children forced into sex by adults can be anything other than victims of abuse.

But there remains a lot we don’t know. These inquiries have tended to focus on the critical issue of how the authorities failed these girls. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse is investigating how institutions have failed to protect children. They leave unanswered the question of what lies behind the patterns of behaviour we see among the male perpetrators. Yet there are recurring patterns to these crimes. How do these men form their attitudes towards women? Who influences them? How do these behaviours become acceptable within the group? The idea that you can take culture out of the equation without further investigation is irresponsible.

We also need a better understanding of who perpetrates these crimes. In some places, it has predominantly been men of Pakistani origin, but in Bristol, the abusers were predominantly Somali; in Peterborough, they were also of Czech and Slovak Roma and Kurdish backgrounds. A report for the children’s commissioner in 2012 found that around a third of perpetrators were white.

Refusing to rule out that culture may play a role does not make way for the absurd idea that this places an obligation on certain communities to “police their own”. That’s as ridiculous as implying white community leaders are directly to blame for the repugnant attitudes of white police officers in Rochdale and Rotherham. And there’s a key difference between the abuse perpetrated within the power structures of institutions such as the BBC and the Catholic church, and the child sexual abuse rings of the sort seen in Newcastle. Those institutions were complicit in allowing abuse to happen in their hierarchies in a way that a whole faith or ethnic community simply cannot be. In Newcastle, most of the perpetrators were second-generation immigrants, which may tell us as much about our school system as the communities and families in which they grew up.

It’s too easy to allow authorities to reach for the 'cultural sensitivities' excuse to explain their failure to act

It’s also too easy to allow authorities to reach for the catch-all “cultural sensitivities” excuse to explain their failure to act. Much easier to play to the tabloid audience, than to admit to the squalid truth that those in a position of authority didn’t see these girls as worth the bother or, even worse, saw them as culpable for their own abuse.

But equally, cultural sensitivity must not be used as a screen for taking culture off the table altogether. It’s right that people who speak out on this do so with extreme caution, given how easy it is for things to be taken out of context to fuel racial hatred. But we should also be attuned to the fact that cultural sensitivity may make us prone to ignore truths we find uncomfortable.

Unless we take the time to understand how and why these crimes are perpetrated, we leave a blank slate that the purveyors of hate can write on. And we stymie any efforts at effective prevention. That’s unforgivable, given that these crimes are not a historic relic of decades past, but the living reality of what it is to be a vulnerable girl growing up in modern Britain. We surely owe it to the past, current and future victims of these crimes to move past the hackneyed punditry and make “never again” a reality, not just a guilty sentiment.