Talking about this yesterday before the game. While the blame lies squarely on those who carried out these terrible offences you can also legitimately ask what (apart from prosecute the perpetrators after the event) society has done to protect the vulnerable victims. Then spoke to one of the guys that sits in front and he and his wife are foster carers. They do some fantastic stuff but he was telling me he also works on a voluntary basis with victims of domestic abuse, particularly the children.
A case he came across involved a woman who was put into council accommodation after escaping domestic abuse. She had 2 kids and was put into a 4-bedroom house, meaning the kids had their own rooms. But because there were only three of them, she was charged bedroom tax of £60 a month for the spare room. Then it was decided that the two kids could share a room (they were teenagers) so she had 2 spare rooms, meaning she was paying £100 a month. To help pay that, he had a part-time job cleaning in a pub but while she was out cleaning, the two kids were unsupervised and got up to no good. As a result they were taken off her and put into care, which cost the state £4000 a week. He said they were basically good kids who probably wouldn't have got into trouble if she'd been there to supervise them.
Beside the iniquity of the bedroom tax putting them in this situation this is a ridiculous waste of scarce resources (cash and carers) and has created a problem that needn't have been so. It just annoyed me so much that no one thought "Have we got this right?". I wonder how many of the victims of grooming gangs could have been kept out of their clutches if we'd applied some intelligence to the issue of protecting vulnerable kids?