I met Andrew Norfolk, who has died at the age of 60, shortly after his first major investigation on grooming gangs was published in the Times in January 2011. We were both guests on a television debate discussing whether it was racist to point out that the majority of perpetrators in these particular gangs — operating mainly in towns across Northern England — were Pakistani Muslims. I had written about the phenomenon in the Sunday Times Magazine four years earlier, and was surprised not only that he arrived armed with that article, but that he held onto it throughout the debate.

Andrew told me afterwards that while he had heard that some Left-wing feminists would be taking part in the programme, he had no idea that I was one of them, and had automatically assumed they would attack him as being “Islamophobic”. Not all feminists, I teased him. He had the grace to look shamefaced.

In my 2007 piece, I explored the ethnicity of the men involved and how it had led many white liberals into a cowardly silence. I hadn’t realised that Andrew had faced accusations of racism — despite wanting to expose the organised abuse, pimping, and torture of children. We bonded over our shared experiences.

I told him that I had spent the previous evening at a Guardian party, where several staffers had argued that his coverage was racist, and that the ethnicity of the men was both irrelevant and exaggerated, since most child abusers are white. This is the problem, Andrew responded: the liberal elite doesn’t want to face inconvenient truths.

We stayed in touch, and it was obvious that he was not one of those reporters who was unaffected by the horror of what he had uncovered. In 2015, I travelled to Leeds to interview him for an academic paper on the experiences of national and local journalists reporting on the Pakistani grooming gangs. “The victims deserve better,” he told me at the time, “and there’s a lot more to the racial side of this story to come out.”

It wasn’t just the allegations of racism that affected Andrew’s peace of mind — far worse were the stories of the victims in his head. He told me he didn’t know what made him more angry and distressed: the torture of the victims, or the complacency of the establishment about what was happening to these girls right under their noses.

Without Andrew’s determination and attention to the harrowing details, we may never have had the 2014 inquiry into the Rotherham gangs. A worthy recipient of the Paul Foot Award and the Orwell Prize for his work with the Times, he was also named 2014 Journalist of the Year.

I last saw Andrew shortly after debate about the gangs re-entered the news at the beginning of this year. He was clearly suffering from ill health, and he told me that he was exhausted. But even so — and despite having retired a couple of months earlier — he spoke eloquently to journalists about what he thought should happen next, and how keenly he regretted the fact that the grooming gangs problem was still as bad as ever.

Some of the victims of the gangs whom we both interviewed, at different times, in different circumstances, spoke to me fondly about Andrew. I never heard a bad word about the man from any of them. They knew he respected them and treated their stories with compassion. There was nothing of the insensitive hack about him: he did the work because he cared. He deserves a great deal of credit for highlighting the truth around this most horrific of scandals.

---

Julie Bindel is an investigative journalist, author, and feminist campaigner. Her latest book is Lesbians: Where are we now? She also writes on Substack.

bindelj

---