It takes courage to speak out
It’s time we listened to victims of abuse and valued their bravery, says series director Katie Hindley
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- Katie Hindley
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We have been working on a documentary about the grooming and sexual abuse of girls – young teenagers – in Barrow-in-Furness for four years. It’s a shocking story. In October 2024, the three Miah brothers, known as Jai, Ali and Sarj, were convicted of offences that included rape of a child, indecent assault, indecency with a child, sexual activity with a child, causing a child to engage in sexual activity, sexual assault of a child, kidnapping and intimidation.
They were horrifying crimes committed in the Cumbrian town and other locations in the north of England between 1996 and 2012. Yet the men who committed them only faced justice because the women who had been their victims fought to be heard and to secure a conviction.
It was a tremendously courageous thing to do; Barrow is a small town and some of the women were threatened with violence if they talked to the police. The psychological impact of these crimes is still felt decades later. The judge acknowledged their bravery in court. Parts of the system that were supposed to protect them – the police, the CPS and social services – had been uninterested in helping, apparently.
Katie Hindley. SKY
We wanted to let them tell their story in their own way. These women have been consistently underestimated. The victims and survivors we spoke to are phenomenally bright and very funny. The women that we interviewed were able to keep details in their heads about when and where abuse had taken place over a decade ago, information that helped get the convictions. They also stood up in court and told the world what had happened to them.
Even when Barrow was being called a “lying town” in the wake of teenager Ellie Williams’s conviction, in 2023, of making up an Asian grooming gang in her hometown, the women were determined to let the truth about what happened to them come to light.
The men only faced justice because the women who had been their victims fought to be heard
There are other women who are continuing to speak out and are yet to secure convictions against their abusers, and there are many more yet to come forward. The series gives a voice to these different experiences.
Over the course of filming the series, what was a societal and criminal problem, the grooming and the abuse of girls, has become a political problem – a lightning rod for left and right that has led to rioting on our streets.
Some have chosen to portray the way these women were treated as evidence of a wider conspiracy against white people. In January 2025, the technology mogul Elon Musk said that the then Safeguarding Minister, Jess Phillips, “deserves to be in prison” because there was no national public inquiry into grooming. That intervention, and others like it, is part of a social media-led pattern of disinformation that claims this very serious and complex problem is caused uniquely by men of Asian background. Such assertions and the racist tropes around them have become normalised.
Not only is this disastrous for society, it also misses the nuances of what is happening. It is clear that nationally there are victims of grooming and abuse from different backgrounds. And just as there are many kinds of victims, there are perpetrators of different ethnicities. Last year Baroness Casey’s audit of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse found that ethnicity was not recorded for about two-thirds of perpetrators. We simply don’t have the data to say that grooming and abuse is more prevalent in Pakistani communities, or more prevalent in the north of England.
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As our documentary airs – and with the Statutory Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs now under way – there are, undoubtedly, abusers still out there. I hope that, as a society, we finally learn to value the opinions and experiences of young women who have been ignored for far too long.
Authors
Katie Hindley
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