There’s a pretty worrying story being carried by the Huffington Post regarding the inquiry that was supposed to look into the issue of organised and specifically Islamic rape gangs. Readers may recall that the Home Secretary Sajid Javid announced a while back that he was instituting an inquiry into the problem of Islamic Rape Gangs and he did this with great fanfare. At the time of the announcement I supported the idea of a proper government inquiry to get to the bottom of a problem that has been with us for decades. An inquiry to get this issue into the open would have been a very good thing indeed.

Sadly there have emerged some quite vehement allegations that Mr Javid has been a bit ‘all mouth and no trousers’ where this sex gang enquiry is concerned. The Labour MP Sarah Champion has alleged that Mr Javid’s department seems to be kicking the inquiry into the long grass and not getting on board those who are expert in the matter of child exploitation.

The Huffington Post said that their investigation into the issue of the inquiry has shown that the Home Secretary is quietly ‘shelving’ the idea of a report into the ethnicity and culture of the rape gangs. This has angered Ms Champion who has said that there is ‘no evidence’ that Mr Javid’s pledge of an inquiry is being honoured.

The Huffington Post said:

The research has so far involved Home Office officials interviewing police investigators about the characteristics of offenders, a review of existing academic research and moves to improve data collection. Much of it will remain confidential due to operational sensitivity.

Javid initially promised the research in a letter to a cross-party group of 20 MPs led by Labour’s Sarah Champion, who told HuffPost UK she had seen “no evidence” to suggest the pledge was being honoured.

“The communications I have had makes me think they are deliberately trying to cover their tracks about commissioning and delivering that research,” she said.

Nazir Afzal, the highly respected former chief crown prosecutor in the north-west of England who brought the Rochdale grooming gang to justice, meanwhile said the lack of action was “seriously concerning given the fact that it’s being exploited by the far-right”.

I have the nasty feeling that Sajid Javid is trying to sweep this issue under the table, just as the Labour local councils and various police forces have done in the past. This may be because the initial investigations into this issue involving police chiefs, may be revealing that the problem is as bad or even worse, than many of those who have highlighted this issue have said it is. Mr Afzal is spot on here, although I believe for the wrong reasons. The matter of Islamic Rape Gangs does need to be investigated, but not merely to stop the exploitation of this issue by the ‘far right’, but for the sake of justice. We have seen from the various cases that have belatedly come to light that although there may well be, as Ms Champion says, other factors such as friendship, school and online links between the offenders, the number of offenders who are Muslim is grossly disproportionate to the number of Muslims living in the United Kingdom.

The Huffington Post added:

In correspondence with Champion seen by HuffPost UK, Javid has also pointed to work by the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse on identifying different types of child abuse, and a strand of the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Sexual Abuse looking at perpetrators.

But Champion said these projects would not address the issues in the way Javid had promised.

“The reality is every month we are waiting we are hearing more and more cases. It’s great that we’re getting people charged but that means it is an ongoing crime,” she added.

“And with other ongoing crimes, for example the inquiry they are doing into the motivators behind knife crime, that was able to get up really fast.”

Ms Champion is correct in her comparison with the knife crime inquiry and this sex gang one. The knife crime got going in double quick time, so why not this one? She does, in one part of the article let Mr Javid off the hook to a certain extent by putting the blame for the low key approach to this enquiry on officials rather than Mr Javid himself, but the fact is that it is Mr Javid who is the Home Secretary and can and should push this matter along. Ministers should not hide behind civil servants but this delay looks very much like what Sajid Javid may be doing.

I had great hopes when Mr Javid announced the inquiry that the issue of Islamic Rape Gangs would at last be properly looked into by the Government. Sadly it seems that I may have been wrong. A strong Home Secretary would have overridden the desires of his Civil Servants to obfuscate about this issue and would have let the disinfecting sunlight in on this problem. Unfortunately these allegations from Ms Champion and Mr Afzal show Sajid Javid as being weak and unable to get to grips with a problem that most urgently needs sorting out.