‘Why isn’t there outrage at what’s happening?’
A year after the fury over her article on sex grooming gangs, Sarah Champion tells Margarette Driscoll she and fellow female MPS are under more threat than ever
Sarah Champion was sitting on the pier at Whitby the other day, enjoying the sunshine, when she was startled by a loud bang. “I don’t know what it was, maybe a chair fell over, but I jumped out of my skin,” she says. “I thought it was a gunshot.”
If Champion sounds paranoid, she has good reason. The Labour MP’S Rotherham constituency was home to one of the worst of the recent child sex abuse rings, in which vulnerable teenagers were preyed on by gangs of men who groomed, trafficked and raped them.
A year ago this weekend, Champion wrote a newspaper article in which she said that the UK has a problem with British Pakistani men exploiting white girls. In one sense, she was stating the obvious: just this week, the supreme court ruled that three Pakistani men convicted of child sexual exploitation in Rochdale should lose their British citizenship.
But in the febrile atmosphere that surrounds matters of race and ethnicity – viz the furore over Boris Johnson’s “letterbox” crack and the row over anti-semitism in the Labour Party – her words provoked outrage. Her life imploded.
“Social media went nuts. It was a tidal wave,” says Champion. “I had the far-right coming for me, saying I had covered up child abuse, that I was effectively a rapist myself [because Rotherham council was run by Labour while the gang was active], while the far-left was calling me a racist.”
We meet at a hotel on the Chatsworth estate, a few miles from Champion’s home. She looks relaxed and elegant in a silky, summer dress, but by anyone’s standards it has been a nightmare year.
The week after writing her piece, she was forced to resign her post as shadow secretary of state for women and equalities. Last November, on a leave-it-all-behind trip to India, she was bitten by a mosquito and contracted a form of malaria that “completely took me out”.
She had to be driven to Westminster from her hospital bed, for December’s key Brexit vote and, with her immune system compromised, has fallen prey to a string of ailments ever since.
The abuse and threats against her have taken on a renewed vigour since the publication in March of a report by Just Yorkshire, a campaign
‘I had the far-right coming for me, while the far-left was calling me racist’
group, which alleged that Muslims in Rotherham have been racially abused as a consequence of her words.
She now qualifies for enhanced police security at the highest level: “If a stranger comes up to me I’m wary, which is difficult because my job as an MP is to be in the public domain. I’m careful, but something flipped in me when Jo [Cox] was murdered. I’m quite fatalistic. If someone wants to get you, they’re going to get you, and you have to accept that as a reality.”
Which doesn’t make it any less stressful. “I know it’s a vain thing to say but I look at photographs of myself before I became an MP [in 2012] and I’ve aged a lot more than six years. I just think ‘Oh, my God…’.”
This is Champion’s first interview since the Just Yorkshire report was published. She has understandably kept a low profile, but has chosen to speak out now because she has become so concerned about the abuse being directed at female MPS. Jo Cox’s murder, two years ago, was its most extreme manifestation, but Champion, 49, fears tragedy could strike again.
Last month alone saw three convictions: Jack Renshaw, 23 – alleged to be a member of the banned neo-nazi group National Action – pleaded guilty to preparing acts of terrorism, having bought a 19in machete with which to murder Rosie Cooper, the Labour MP for Skelmersdale. Naa’imur Zakariyah Rahman was found guilty of plotting to kill Theresa May. He had talked of beheading the Prime Minister and detonating a suicide bomb at Westminster. Jack Coulson, 19, was
jailed for a terror offence, after boasting that he wanted to kill Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger.
As a fellow Yorkshire MP, Champion knew Cox: “I just don’t understand why there isn’t outrage at what’s happening,” she says.
“I have found eight female MPS with convictions against perpetrators – and there are only 209 of us. That’s convictions, not just threats. It’s extraordinary it’s not news.
“Two years ago, a female MP was murdered, so this isn’t us crying wolf, this is a reality. So, ask yourself, why aren’t we more shocked?”
She theorises that it’s down to the same undervaluing of women that allowed the abuse of vulnerable teenagers to happen right under the authorities’ noses.
Champion knew full well that what she had to say last year would make waves, she just wasn’t expecting a tsunami.
She was watching an evening news report about the convictions in Newcastle, where grooming gang members were jailed for up to 29 years, and noted that although pictures of the 17 accused were shown, no mention was made of their ethnic origin.
Many people believe that a similar reluctance – to avoid the risk of being called “racist” – deterred police and social workers from investigating the gangs in Rotherham and elsewhere, and allowed the abuse of girls to continue.
Then the phone rang: it was the
Today programme on BBC Radio 4, asking if she would come on the next morning to talk about the case. Champion, a former chief executive of a children’s hospice, decided to say what was on her mind: we needed to recognise that many of the perpetrators
were of Pakistani heritage, in order to understand what was going on.
She didn’t sleep much that night: “I know Islamophobia is a real thing. I know that for 10 years the far-right has been using the abuse of girls as a way to stir up racial hatred. I thought: ‘What’s the bigger risk? Unless we work our why these gangs do what they do, the abuse is going to continue. I have to protect the children’,” she explains.
In the 48 hours after the interview, she received 3,000 emails and letters, overwhelmingly supportive. Then The Sun asked her to put what she had said into an article – and everything went wild.
Champion insists she is no racist (she is “mortified” by the inept handling of the anti-semitism row by Labour), but she stands by her assertion that ethnicity is a key component in understanding how the gangs operate.
She has persuaded all the MPS who have had Asian gangs operating in their constituencies to join a cross-party working group, which has successfully lobbied Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, for research.
“The real frustration is that I don’t
know what motivated these gangs. Other than being of Pakistani heritage, what is the commonality?” she asks. “It might be that they went to the same school. People sloppily call them ‘Muslims’, but are they Muslims? I don’t know. They could be Pakistani Christians. The police tell me that with ‘traditional’ paedophiles, they know what the motivators are, so they can disrupt. With gang-grooming, it’s different. People say it’s cultural. It might be, but we don’t know that.
“I don’t think it’s about sexual gratification as it would be with a paedophile. My personal feeling is it’s just another commodity for the gangs to be making money out of… but I can’t be sure.”
What she does know is that there is a pattern to the events in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Newcastle, Oxford and wherever else child sexual exploitation has been uncovered.
“I started off by saying jokily ‘Is there a manual?’, but actually, there must be some organised sharing of information on how to do this, whether it’s learning by example or more formal,” she says.
Champion is not without friends in the Asian community. Last week, as it was revealed that the Home Office had approved visas for men to come to Britain even where forced marriage was suspected. Karma Nirvana, a leading advice service for Asian girls in Derby, said it stood “shoulder-to-shoulder with Sarah Champion and other politicians across parties who speak honestly about this issue”.
Such support spurs her on, so she has no intention of standing down: “It’s the weirdest thing, the sense of duty and responsibility you feel with this job,” she says. “I am quite a long way from done.”
‘Two years ago, a female MP was murdered, so this isn’t us crying wolf ’