In 2003, I moved from London to Leeds to become north-east correspondent of The Times. One of the first stories I covered, briefly, was from Keighley in West Yorkshire, where the local Labour MP, Ann Cryer, revealed concerns about the targeting of young teenage girls by “Asian men” outside the gates of two local schools.
Parents of girls aged 12-14, lured by older men into a world of alcohol, drugs and sex, complained that the police and social services seemed uninterested in their plight. We published a short article about the claims, then I sat back and turned to other stories.
If I’m honest, I didn’t want the story to be true because it made me deeply uncomfortable. The suggestion that men from a