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The news from Rotherham becomes more horrific. Up to 1,400 children exploited and abused. And today we learn via an audit by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary that officers from South Yorkshire police – to whom many victims turned – were previously criticised by the police inspectorate for spending “a great deal of time trying to disprove victims’ allegations”. Little wonder so many victims felt they had to fend for themselves.
We know the authorities could and should have intervened, but failed to do so. Why? We see social workers were overstretched. Others apparently saw the whole thing as the nihilism of the underclass and thus not deserving of the time that might have been afforded had these atrocities occurred in the uplands of Surrey. We know forces perennially fall down when it comes to believing children who claim abuse, and struggle to deal with sexual offences across the board. We know that some of the abused characterised the link to their abusers as a “relationship” and that we struggle to tackle domestic offences. So we know of much that probably led to the multiple failure that was Rotherham, and probably contributed to the parallel cases in Rochdale, Oxford and Oldham.
But can it really be true – as the tabloids and the right robustly claim – that a significant contributor truly was political correctness; the fear of officials that by intervening appropriately in cases where the suspects were Pakistani Muslims, they themselves would be castigated as racist? If it is, it is outrageous. It is also ludicrous.
Political correctness – if we are to persist with that hackneyed term – required members of a diverse society to accord to others the level of dignity they would want for themselves. The right conflated its meaning so as to describe any prescription on its behaviour that it didn’t like. Everything, from the description of coffee to adoption policy, became “political correctness gone mad”. Perhaps the idea was to discredit the concept by hoisting it into the realm of absurdity. But even then, the concept never, ever required anyone to turn a blind eye to the mass abuse of the vulnerable by criminals. And anyway, to do so on grounds of political correctness would never have made sense.
If a backlash was feared, where would it have come from? There is no minority lobby for criminals and paedophiles. So long as communities knew the issue was one of law enforcement rather than an assault on those communities themselves, they would have supported tough action by the authorities. Look to London in the 1990s when the Met was able to take tough action against gun-toting gangsters in black communities by making lay advisers from those communities part of the drive against that manifestation of gun crime.
If senior managers truly encouraged their juniors to hold off in the name of political correctness, they took the path of least resistance and should be brought to book. But that would have been such a mass dereliction of duty that I’m loth to believe it happened on such a scale. I know that if called to account, I’d much prefer to say, “I wanted to intervene but was terrified by political correctness”, than “I messed up”, “I didn’t think it was that serious” or “I couldn’t be bothered”.
In no other sphere does PC and its terrors prevent the authorities taking action against minorities. We’re over-represented in courts and prisons at one end of the social scale, overdisciplined and marginalised in the professions at the other. If it is true that political correctness prevented the authorities from using their powers against minorities for fear of giving offence, that’s a scandal. It would also be a first.
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