What’s behind the resurgent anger at Britain’s sexual abuse and grooming gangs crisis, an issue that made headlines over a decade ago? Sheer racism and Islamophobia. It’s an anger that is more about racist politics than protecting young girls.
In the north British town of Rotherham, a horror story unfolded in the early 2010s. Investigations started to reveal that at least 1,400 girls had been sexually abused by organized “grooming gangs” operating between 1997 and 2013. Girls as young as 11 had been systematically raped, trafficked to other towns, abducted and beaten. The scandal resulted in the resignations of local officials, including the region’s police commissioner. Similar crimes had been committed in the towns of Rochdale, Telford and Oldham.
Police investigations into these grotesque and heinous acts led to numerous convictions of the perpetrators, who were predominantly Pakistani men. Fast forward almost a decade later, and the victims’ suffering is now being used by right-wing politicians seeking to paint all immigrants and Muslims as a stain on the country.
The issue of “grooming gangs” has once again become a political football, with the suffering of innocent young girls being hijacked to demonize Muslims and manufacture further ire against immigrants. At the forefront of such divisive rhetoric are far-right activist Tommy Robinson and Conservative MPs Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman, who falsely claimed in 2023 that all such grooming gangs were made up of “Pakistani men.”
The far right is demonizing Muslims and Asians while ignoring the plethora of high-profile sexual abuse scandals involving white men.
Jenrick wrote in The Telegraph that “not all cultures are equal” and that “alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women” caused this problem. This shocking and brazenly racist statement is a betrayal of the British values of respect that he, as a member of parliament, is meant to uphold. It’s also factually incorrect for another reason: While he blames “alien cultures” for sexual crimes, the vast majority of child sexual offenders actually tend to be white men.
What’s worse is that tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has a following of more than 200 million on X, is actively spreading these false ideas internationally. The framing of this as a “Muslim” or “Pakistani” problem is deeply troubling and disingenuous. It distracts from the real causes of sexual abuse and uses the suffering of the victims as a tool to demonize an entire community. The resurfacing of this issue serves three purposes for the far right:
- It paints Muslims and immigrants as sexual deviants and plays on the long-standing racist trope that brown people are barbarians and lesser humans.
- It allows Britain’s right-wing Conservative Party to attack the ruling Labour Party for ignoring the issue of grooming gangs. In fact, the entire scandal took place during the Conservatives’ time in office, who failed to implement any of the 20 recommendations in a national inquiry into child sexual abuse.
- It furthers the anti-immigrant arguments of the far right.
University of Strathclyde professor Alexis Jay, who chaired the aforementioned landmark inquiry into child sex abuse in England and Wales, told the BBC she was “very unhappy with the politicization of child sexual exploitation” which was done in a “very uninformed way.” She said such rhetoric “risked distracting” from the actual issue of sexual abuse.
The Conservative government’s own Home Office report in 2020 found that grooming gangs come from “diverse backgrounds” and any links between ethnicity and this type of crime could not be proven. It said that over-representation of Black and Asian offenders was relative to the demographics in the area. Money and sex were cited as the main motivators, not culture or race.
Independent research corroborates this. Most group-based sexual offenders are white men, according to the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse. It revealed that 88% of sexual offenders in 2022 were white, reflecting an over-representation as compared to the general population of white people (83%). About 7% of sexual offenders were Asian, lower than the 9% of Asians in the country.
A November 2024 report by the Hydrant Programme, based on data from 44 police forces across England and Wales, also found that in group-based sexual offences, 83% of the perpetrators in 2023 were white while 7% were Asian.
The far right is demonizing Muslims and Asians while ignoring the plethora of high-profile sexual abuse scandals involving white men.
Indeed, Britain’s “worst paedophile” was a white British millionaire named William Goad, who sexually abused 3,500 children over 30 years. In the ‘biggest-ever’ child sex abuse ring in the West Midlands, 21 middle-aged white men and women were convicted for systematic sexual abuse with victims as young as 12. These cases never gained the same level of media interest or public attention that crimes committed by South Asians did. And one of the most prolific sexual predators in the U.K. was media personality Jimmy Saville, who abused, raped and assaulted up to 1,000 children in hospitals, BBC studios and changing rooms over more than half a century.
“Every time this issue is kicked around politically the feelings of vulnerability and helplessness return for me — the feeling of being used by men who say they care about you.”
Race and religion have nothing to do with these crimes. We don’t label sexual crimes by white men as a “Christian” problem, so why do we when the perpetrators are of a Muslim background? The argument that this kind of sexual deviation exists because of “Muslim” or “Pakistani” culture is not only factually wrong, it’s a dangerous racist trope by people attempting to build political capital by demonizing minorities.
This attempt to demonize Muslims is a tried-and-tested strategy in the racist playbook and reeks of hypocrisy. Those who are now shouting the loudest about the issue of grooming gangs didn’t say a word about these cases, or the wider issue of child sexual abuse, when they were in office and could have done something about it.
“The same people who didn’t implement those recommendations, calling for another inquiry – isn’t that the definition of political opportunism?” That’s what BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire asked Nadine Dorris, a former Conservative government minister who is calling for another national inquiry into child sex abuse. She received no coherent response.
When BBC presenter Nick Robinson questioned Jenrick multiple times about whether he raised this issue even once in his entire term as a minister in the Conservative government from 2019 to 2023, Jenrick was unable to give any convincing response, either.
Allowing far-right figures to make this issue about race is a disservice to the victims.
As one survivor of child sexual abuse told iNews recently, “Every time this issue is kicked around politically the feelings of vulnerability and helplessness return for me — the feeling of being used by men who say they care about you.” Another wrote in Glamour Magazine UK: “Every time [child sexual abuse] gets some meaningful coverage in mainstream media, someone like Elon Musk comes along and undercuts its moment with ill-informed soundbites. And every time we fall for it.”
Such hypocrisy and politicization fail victims, damage prevention efforts and reveal a sinister political agenda where scoring political points is more important than protecting vulnerable women and children.
