The Betrayed Girls

The horrors of the Rochdale grooming scandal, in which young girls were sexually abused while the authorities chose not to act, have already been admirably dealt with by the BBC this year with their brilliant docu-drama, 'Three Girls'. 'The Betrayed Girls' serves as a straightforward supplement, a pure documentary that both puts the drama in a slightly wider context and provides us with confirmation that it was an accurate depiction of the truth. Understandably, it doesn't feature direct to-camera interviews with the victims, and so lacks the immediacy of the earlier program; it also puts more emphasis on the difficult racial context of the crimes, which was possibly one reason why they were unaddressed for so long. To me the real point (which is also made by some of those involved) is the basic contempt with which children from so-called "bad" families were held in, contempt that both drove the abusers, and led to the abuse being ignored. And that's a worrying lesson for all races in British society.