‘It could have been me’: The Grenfell children who survived the blaze
Sixty-seven children lived in Grenfell Tower when the west London block caught fire in June 2017. Eighteen of them never got a chance to grow up.
For many of the others, the traumatic loss, anxiety and PTSD that followed the disaster has shaped their childhoods and young adult lives.
They lost friends, family and everything they owned; spent months or years in hotels; and missed valuable school time.
In the seven years since the tragedy, more than 1,000 children and young people have been treated for mental health issues, according to the NHS Health and Wellbeing Hub, set up in the wake of Grenfell.
They were traumatised by what they saw or heard from friends and family, by having to cope with the loss of a friend or a neighbour, their natural sense of safety shattered on the night of the fire.
New referrals still come in each month.
This week, the Grenfell Inquiry releases its final report into the fire that cost 72 lives.
Sky News has spoken to some of the children who survived the tragedy. These are their stories.
Luana, 19: ‘I feel guilty that I’m here living’
Luana Gomes was 12 at the time of the fire. She managed to escape, with her sister and her pregnant mother, but they were in a coma for weeks. Her baby brother, Logan, was stillborn – the youngest victim of the disaster.
Now 19 and standing at the base of the tower, Luana can’t help but smile at some of the memories.
Pointing to where their flat was on the 21st floor, she recalls looking out the window and calling out to her friends in the park below.
“Every time my friends were down there I’d shout their names. I don’t think they could hear me,” she says, laughing.
She recalls how her friend Mehdi would knock on her door and be scared of her dog: “She was so tiny and sweet but he was terrified of her, which was funny.”
Eventually Mehdi won over his fear of the dog. He died in the fire along with his sister, brother and parents. He was eight.
Luana as a little girl
Luana pauses, takes a deep breath and says: “I feel a bit guilty.
“When you think about your friends and family members and neighbours – I feel guilty that I’m here living and doing all this stuff, and they didn’t get the chance to live and do the stuff they wanted to at such a young age.”
The last seven years have been difficult. She has suffered from anxiety and depression. She missed weeks of school by being in hospital, and remembers being painfully behind when she went back to the classroom.
But she has found solace in dance. This month she goes to university to study it. It’s a cliche, she says, but “dance allows me to express my feelings in a way I can’t say in words”.
Since surviving the fire, Luana has found solace in dance
She doesn’t want to speak about the little brother she lost, but shows us a message to him written years ago on the memorial wall.
The message says: “Logan. I love and miss you so, so, so much and know that your big sister is always thinking of you. RIEP Brother.”
Abem, 12: ‘It could have been me’
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‘I realised the burning building was my own home’
Abem Abraham’s memory of his first home is hazy, but he remembers watching the tower burn, and he remembers the best friend he lost.
As the fire raged, four-year-old Abem was taken down the smoke-filled stairs by his parents – then to a friend who lived nearby. He was safe.
But before falling asleep that night, he looked out of the curtains.
“I see a tall building block engulfed in flames. I don’t know what it was,” he recalls all these years later.
“And then later I realised that it was my own home.”
Seven years after the Grenfell tragedy, Abem called on politicians to remove ‘deadly’ cladding
The cruellest part of the tragedy was losing his best friend, five-year-old Isaac Paulos.
“He was my best friend from my school at the time,” he says. “He was a bit older than me, like a brother. Like a big brother.”
Abem is a kind, smart and energetic boy who loves Formula One, basketball and football. He plays a Manchester United song on the piano, and proudly shows me his new PlayStation 5 – a present from his uncle for having done well at school.
Abem with his friend Isaac, who was killed in the blaze
But this 12-year-old also has a message for the politicians and developers.
“They need to remove the cladding off of every UK building because that cladding is deadly. When it comes to fire, it can destroy houses within minutes, within hours, like it did to Grenfell. Everyone, please, please remove it.”
He wants the children who died to be remembered for their “bright dreams”.
“One of them wanted to be a footballer, wanted to be an engineer, wanted to be an architect. All gone in one flame,” he says.
“It could have been me.”
Ines, 23: ‘I was known as Grenfell girl’
Ines sat her chemistry GCSE exam a day after the blaze. Pic: Lauren Hurley/PA
As her family ran from the burning building soon after the fire started, 16-year-old Ines Alves grabbed her textbooks.
The next morning, with her home a smouldering ruin, she sat her chemistry GCSE exam.
In the days after the tragedy that destroyed her home, Ines became known as “Grenfell girl”. She has spent much of the past years trying to escape that title.
Initially, she was a viral inspiration. In the months that followed the tragedy, she gave interviews about the disaster and updates on her grades and results to eager journalists.
Ines became known as ‘Grenfell girl’, a title she wishes to escape
But it was the following year’s AS-level exams that triggered a mental health crisis.
“My biggest trauma was watching the building burning and people screaming, as I was revising for my GCSEs,” she says.
“So just revising and concentrating generally just kind of led me to dark places after that.
“When June came around it just kind of all came rushing back. And I had probably the biggest mental breakdown. It was just a horrible time.”
Pic: Lauren Hurley/PA
She ended up retaking the academic year. It was difficult seeing her friends go off to university without her – but she eventually found her own path.
For Ines, Grenfell is a story in her past, one she doesn’t want to define her future.
At university, she craved anonymity. One of her best friends didn’t realise it was her for over a year. “She just said to me, ‘that was you! What the hell?!'”
Now she’s graduated from Leeds with a degree in maths and has been travelling the world – Australia, Thailand and other parts of Asia.
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“Trying to live life like a normal young adult,” she says.
“I kind of don’t really like to live life by knowing what I’m going to do in a month’s time.”
Yousra, 19: ‘They’re not just numbers’
Yousra lived on Grenfell Walk, at the base of the tower
Yousra Cherbika is angry. She’s angry about the fire, the friends she lost, the home she can never return to – and the way she feels other children and young people were treated after the disaster.
She was 12 years old when she watched the tower burn, desperately calling her friend Nur Huda who lived inside to “get out”. But she couldn’t, and her whole family perished.
“They’re not just numbers. They’re not just ‘part of 72’,” she says.
“They have names, we love them. They had stories to tell. They had full lives which were cut short.”
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Grenfell Tower lit up for anniversary
Yousra and her family lived on Grenfell Walk, at the base of the tower. Less is known about those residents who managed to escape, but they also lost everything in the disaster.
“There’s parts of my childhood that I just block out and I don’t remember, like the year after the fire,” she says.
“I don’t remember living in a hotel. We were in one room, five of us, and my mum was pregnant.
“I had no home to go back to, no school to go back to. And even when we did go back to school, it was different, because there were empty chairs in our classrooms.”
Green ribbon hangs from a lampost near the tower
She feels as though their support as ‘Walk’ residents was much worse.
“We didn’t know what we were entitled to at first, and so many people turned us away.”
Yousra wants to be a teacher
Today Yousra is a campaigner, a leader among local young people, volunteering in her spare time.
She is also training to be a primary school teacher, inspired by the form tutor who helped her through her lowest, darkest points in secondary school.
“I just stayed in bed and I just didn’t go into school. But she encouraged me. She motivated me.”
She feels outraged that seven years on, there is still cladding on buildings across the country.
“Why does it take 72 people to die for them to even think, oh, ‘maybe we should take cladding that might kill people?’
“And still, they haven’t done that.”
Watch Sky News’ special programme on Grenfell tonight at 8pm.
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Read more on grooming gangs:
What we do and don’t know from the data
A timeline of the scandal
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
Flawed data has been used repeatedly to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs”, Baroness Louise Casey has said in a new report, as she called for a new national inquiry.
The government has accepted her recommendations to introduce compulsory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in grooming cases, and for a review of police records to launch new criminal investigations into historic child sexual exploitation cases.
Politics latest: Yvette Cooper reveals details of grooming gangs report
Baroness Louise Casey carried out the review. Pic: PA
The crossbench peer has produced an audit of sexual abuse carried out by grooming gangs in England and Wales, after she was asked by the prime minister to review new and existing data, including the ethnicity and demographics of these gangs.
In her report, she has warned authorities that children need to be seen “as children” and called for a tightening of the laws around the age of consent so that any penetrative sexual activity with a child under 16 is classified as rape. This is “to reduce uncertainty which adults can exploit to avoid or reduce the punishments that should be imposed for their crimes”, she added.
Baroness Casey said: “Despite the age of consent being 16, we have found too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13 to 15-year-old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The peer has called for a nationwide probe into the exploitation of children by gangs of men.
She has not recommended another over-arching inquiry of the kind conducted by Professor Alexis Jay, and suggests the national probe should be time-limited.
The national inquiry will direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the inquiry’s “purpose is to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies”.
On the issue of ethnicity, Baroness Casey said police data was not sufficient to draw conclusions as it had been “shied away from”, and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.
‘Flawed data’
However, having examined local data in three police force areas, she found “disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination”.
She added: “Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young white girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.
“Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue.
“This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.”
Read more:
Officials tried to cover up grooming scandal, says Cummings
Why many victims welcome national inquiry into grooming gangs
Grooming gangs scandal timeline
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From January: Grooming gangs: What happened?
The baroness hit out at the failure of policing data and intelligence for having multiple systems which do not communicate with each other.
She also criticised “an ambivalent attitude to adolescent girls both in society and in the culture of many organisations”, too often judging them as adults.
‘Deep-rooted failure’
Responding to Baroness Casey’s review, Ms Yvette Cooper told the House of Commons: “The findings of her audit are damning.
“At its heart, she identifies a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children. A continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation, and serious violence.
She added: “Baroness Casey found ‘blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions’ all played a part in this collective failure.”
Ms Cooper said she will take immediate action on all 12 recommendations from the report, adding: “We cannot afford more wasted years repeating the same mistakes or shouting at each other across this House rather than delivering real change.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper responded to the report. Pic: PA
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said: “After months of pressure, the prime minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory national inquiry into the grooming gangs.
“We must remember that this is not a victory for politicians, especially the ones like the home secretary, who had to be dragged to this position, or the prime minister. This is a victory for the survivors who have been calling for this for years.”
Ms Badenoch added: “The prime minister’s handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership. His judgement has once again been found wanting.
“Since he became prime minister, he and the home secretary dismissed calls for an inquiry because they did not want to cause a stir.
“They accused those of us demanding justice for the victims of this scandal as, and I quote, ‘jumping on a far right bandwagon’, a claim the prime minister’s official spokesman restated this weekend – shameful.”
The government has promised new laws to protect children and support victims so they “stop being blamed for the crimes committed against them”.
It is also launching new police operations and a new national inquiry to direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.
There will also be new ethnicity data and research “so we face up to the facts on exploitation and abuse,” the home secretary said.
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