Chris Gray

Rory Stewart, I beg you to come and see for yourself why the grooming gang scandal is far from irrelevant—not to my life, or to the lives of the thousands of other victims and families affected. Our lives were torn apart by deeply embedded failures within institutions that enabled the mass sexual abuse of children, while those children were blamed, ignored and left to suffer the consequences. Children were failed because institutions prioritised political sensitivities over safeguarding. That is not ancient history. It is a pattern of institutional failure that continues to have consequences today. Please tell the families who lost loved ones as a result of these failures that their deaths were irrelevant. To suggest the grooming gang scandal isn't important compared to other national issues completely misses the point. The very issues that allowed it to happen, fear of being accused of racism, institutional cowardice, political correctness and the prioritisation of community cohesion over children's safety, have not simply disappeared. The scandal exposed a poison that had been allowed to spread through our institutions. It exposed how different standards could be applied depending on who the victims and perpetrators were, and how concerns were repeatedly ignored when authorities feared the consequences of acknowledging what was happening. That failure didn't just destroy individual lives. It damaged public trust, allowed organised criminality to flourish, and left vulnerable children exposed to horrific abuse. Downplaying this scandal is precisely why victims went unheard for decades. And for anyone who thinks this is simply history: it isn't. It is still happening. Children are still being failed. Victims are still being ignored. And the same institutional patterns continue to put people at risk. The grooming gang scandal is not irrelevant. It is one of the clearest examples of what happens when institutions abandon their duty to protect children in favour of protecting themselves. So please, Rory Stewart, tell me why that isn't important.