On 'grooming' (read: rape) gangs

An analysis of how and why unspeakable crimes were made possible in Britain

In recent days ‘grooming gangs’ have shot up the political agenda, in large part because Elon Musk has begun spreading the word on X/Twitter. It’s a strangely euphemistic term, used to refer to what one columnist more accurately describes as ‘the industrial-scale rape of poor and working-class girls…covered up because the authorities were terrified of being called racist’.

Precise statistics about the perpetrators are hard to come by (which in itself says a lot) but in most high-profile cases the men involved were either predominantly, or virtually entirely, of Pakistani-Muslim heritage.

The phenomenon serves as a searing indictment of liberal groupthink. It demonstrates in the starkest of terms how bad things can get when people prioritise adherence to ideological dogma over dealing with social reality in all its complexity. And it raises questions about a range of topics – Islam, attitudes and beliefs in sections of the Muslim community, mass immigration, multiculturalism, etc – that simply cannot be satisfactorily answered by chanting the sort of leftist mantras we’ve been forced to listen to nonstop for over a decade.

Some of the facts that have emerged online are unimaginably grim. Indeed, such is the depth of the depravity it’s hard to know where to start.

A 16-year-old, pregnant with the baby she had conceived with her abuser while underage, was burned to death along with her mother and disabled sister. A 14-year-old disappeared into thin air, and is suspected to have been murdered. A 12-year-old wandered around for 24 hours being repeatedly gang raped, seemingly at random, by almost everyone she encountered (see below). Children as young as 11 were raped by numerous men, one after another. The exact number of victims is unknown but is estimated to be in the several thousands.

Like something out of a horror movie. The ringleader spent only three years behind bars.

In many instances the authorities knew that these bands of paedophiles were operating – they knew that kids were being plied with alcohol, drugged and violated, often in the most unimaginably brutal ways. But on far too many occasions they seemingly failed to act.

Those with the power to do something about it deliberately didn’t tell parents in case it upset ‘community relations’. Politicians said as little as possible, and instead spent their time stymying and opposing enquiries into the gangs (they’re still doing this, by the way). Media outlets obfuscated and deflected. ‘Academics’ and commentators accused the people who were discussing the issue honestly of being ‘islamophobic’, and devoted their energy to gaslighting the world by doing things like changing the title of the Wikipedia entry on the topic to ‘Grooming Gang Moral Panic’.

Statistics about the ethnicity of the males involved were kept under wraps, or simply not collected or disclosed. MPs were told to keep shtum to avoid offending or losing voters. State researchers who did raise concerns were sent to ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ training for speaking the truth (see below).

Yes, this actually happened.

In Bradford, to quote journalist Sam Ashworth-Hayes, ‘when a child "married" her abuser in a traditional Islamic wedding, her social worker attended the ceremony’. Elsewhere, after a young girl was found naked and drugged with seven men, the girl was reportedly arrested, for being drunk and disorderly. Fathers were taken into custody when they tried to save their daughters. Victims were told to shut up. On and on it goes.

These rank as some of the worst sex crimes in modern British history. But, as Brendan O’Neill puts it, ‘such a spectacle threatened to unravel the self-flattering ideologies of the new elites, who insist that whites are “problematic” and Muslims are “oppressed.” So it was downplayed, brushed aside. It seems preserving the left’s narrative is considered more important than preserving the sanctity of a poor white girl’s life’. That’s about right.

Bear in mind, also, that this stuff was going on at the absolute peak of the #MeToo and woke eras. 'Feminists’ built careers grandstanding against ‘everyday sexism’ and pretending plush university campuses were dominated by a ‘rape culture’, at the same time as they were seeking to smear the few people speaking in plain terms about actual violent sexual exploitation of underage females as bigots. They fought an imaginary rape culture, while turning a blind eye to a real one for political reasons.

‘Anti-racists who chant ‘silence is violence’ and claim to be traumatised by ‘microaggressions’ said absolutely nothing about the racially and religiously motivated nature of these heinous crimes. Rather than ‘standing up’ for the victims, they went around hounding their relatives and demanding that discussion of the subject was censored. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: these people are the biggest frauds on the planet.

This guy was meant to have been deported to Pakistan. Surprise, surprise: he wasn’t.

Look, no sane person thinks all Muslim men are implicated in this. There’s a whiff of hysteria about the way it’s being discussed on social media, also, that I am slightly uncomfortable with (then again, if anything’s worthy of outrage it’s surely stories like the ones I’ve outlined here). But my objective here is not to ‘inflame tensions’, which judging by Twitter do seem heightened, rather it’s to facilitate transparent and honest discussion of problems that cannot go unaddressed any longer.

This really should be one of the biggest scandals in generations. At its core, it touches on one of the most foundational social imperatives: a society’s ability to protect its young people from harm. Ignoring it any longer is not just morally indefensible, it’s unsustainable.

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