A good citizen.

Saturdays Daily Mail ran a feature about a Jewish lady Renee Black and her best friend a Muslim gent Sadiq Patel who had visited Manchester on the Day of the vigil in Albert Square. It was a story of hope, widely shared around the world. An unusual friendship you might say, but united in their grief and compassion, their deep rooted and long friendship reflected their values not their faiths and is an extraordinary example to us all.

The same newspaper having focussed on this positive interfaith feature ran a really negative story about the sexual abuse in Rochdale. The story focussed on the faith of the perpetrators to such an extent that the abuse seemed almost a distraction within the story. We must of course remember this was about sexual abuse, a crime which can be and is committed by people of any race or culture and in any community. Unlike the story about Renee and Sadiq, this story will do nothing but inspire hatred and goes some way to explain why people don’t speak up when they can. They are frightened of the consequences. We must work harder to create and enable environments where people can speak up, will be listened to and won’t be stereotyped, its our best safeguard against the scourges of radicalisation and sexual exploitation affecting young people and our communities.

You might wonder why I think these stories are connected.

Young people, particularly those who are vulnerable are open to being groomed. Grooming isn’t just about sexual exploitation, its about a misuse of power. Young people can be groomed in other ways, including being radicalised. As we know from other places around the world, being radicalised isn’t limited to one faith. As a society, we all need to do more to protect young people from these gross manipulations of trust and power. We need to look out for signs of abuses of power of all kinds and we need to listen and act when young people are giving us clues as to what’s going on for them.

People should be and are encouraged to speak out against these scourges in our society, and thankfully, some do.  There are processes in place to enable this. The Prevent Strategy aims to support speaking out around radicalisation through placing a duty on schools and universities. There are similar strategies in place around child sexual exploitation. I wonder what we could learn from how these different strategies are introduced, supported and delivered? I wonder what the shared learning might be and what cross overs there are.

 It’s good that we have them. But I suspect they work best when those charged with the responsibility to act listen, have the skills and capacity to listen, listen without stereotyping and listen without prejudice. And more importantly, if having listened, they act on what they then know;  building up profiles of information, testing what’s known through different lens, assessing risk and mitigating potential issues. I imagine this is what goes on in the background, but its constantly dependent on the supply of new information.

However, people will only come forward if there isn’t a real or perceived backlash against  the communities in which the activities are taking place. Just because you find one bad apple, it doesn’t mean you should give up on the whole tree. The chief prosecutor in the Rochdale case was himself Muslim and experienced a backlash from his own community. Not because of what or who he was prosecuting, but because people were frightened of what the case might mean for them in terms of hate crimes, racist incidents and fear from the broader community, they feared the exposure the case would bring. These issues are complex, multi layered and unpicking them creates tensions. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look at them.

Those people brave enough to speak up need our support. Being a whistleblower, or putting your head above the parapet is a very lonely place. The sexual health worker in the Rochdale child sexual exploitation case spoke out time and time and time again. But no-one heard her. In many ways, the whistleblower in this case suffered along with the girls, telling her story many times over, being ignored, not being believed, internalising what she knew and feeling increasingly guilty for not being able to address the problem. A parallel story to that of the girls, a victim just like them and powerless, just like them. No wonder she has suffered as a result and the final straw must have been losing her job.

We need people to speak up when things aren’t right, to stand up for what we believe in, stand up to abuse, stand up to terrorism, stand up for us. But people won’t if being a whistleblower and challenging the status quo comes with negative consequences that makes the risk of doing the right thing too great. Its up to all of us to change that so that people can speak out without fear, without feeling exposed and without the risk of abuse themselves. We want to create an environment where we prioritise the safeguarding of our children from grooming of any kind.  And so there’s something here about supporting and recognising the concept of being a good citizen, doing what’s right, taking responsibility and acting in best interests and there’s something here about resourcing those in authority to whom we have delegated the power to change things to listen and act. Its clearly in our best interests.