Solicitor: Inquiry won’t give grooming victims justice

ODN

Solicitor Jonathan Bridge said many grooming gang victims doubt a new inquiry will help. He said previous investigations exposed failures by councils and police. Instead, he said that victims want therapy, compensation and accountability, not more inquiries, adding that most have “never asked” for a public inquiry. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn

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00:00I've spoken to quite a few clients and they all seem to be saying the same thing really that they

00:03are skeptical about what a further inquiry could achieve. We've already had the J inquiry which

00:09went on for seven years. It came up with 20 recommendations which successive governments

00:13have ignored and they are very dubious about what a further inquiry might achieve. I could go

00:18through lots and lots of files and they all have the same facts on them. It's a young white girl

00:23who's been abused by gangs quite often in a deprived area usually in the north of England.

00:29There are big failings by local authority. That's where I become involved. We sue the local

00:33authority for damages. There's often failings by the police. We all know this already. There's no

00:38point having a further inquiry to establish what we already know. They want therapy. They want

00:42treatments. They want somebody to hold their hand up and say yes we let you down. They want compensation

00:48because many of these people will never work because they've got such serious psychiatric injury.

00:53Never once has somebody come to me and said I want a public inquiry or even the NCA

00:58involvement. Most of them have already been through the criminal process. That's not what they want.

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