Britain’s Long-Overdue Reckoning With ‘Grooming Gangs’ 

A challenge of describing Britain’s grooming gang scandal for an international audience is convincing the reader that it really happened and is not simply the product of a morbid fantasy.

This is not just because the crimes at its heart—those crimes being the rape and torture of young girls—are so appalling. They are, of course, but appalling crimes happen everywhere, becoming no less evil for their pervasiveness. Nor is it not just because the crimes took place on such a vast scale. In Rotherham alone, in South Yorkshire, there might have been 1,500 victims. It is also because the authorities—police officers, social workers and politicians—failed so miserably and wickedly to prevent them.

In Rotherham, and Rochdale, and Telford, and many, many other places, evil men raped vulnerable girls with impunity while the officials looked the other way (and, in some cases, actively helped). How could this have happened?

It is partly because the perpetrators were disproportionately of migrant heritage. A striking number of them were ethnically Pakistani. Most—though not all—of their victims were white girls, which, judging by the vicious comments that have been reported, had a lot to do with anti-white racism. “All white girls are good for is sex,” one rapist reportedly told his victim, “They are just slags.”

Local authorities were uncomfortable about digging into claims of young girls being raped on the grounds of political correctness. In Telford, for example, according to an independent report, authorities feared “complaints of racism”.

Political correctness also dampened broader interest. A 2004 documentary, Edge of the City, was pulled by the broadcaster Channel 4 amid fears that it could “inflame racial tensions”. Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion, Labour MPs, were widely condemned for emphasizing the role of Pakistani men in the gangs. This contributed to what I have called “a conspiracy of murmuring”. The phenomenon was gradually acknowledged—but in the barest possible terms. Instead of being buried, it was simply filed away.

Yet political correctness was not the only contributing factor. Indeed, the basest forms of classism and misogyny seem to have motivated police indifference. The victims, according to one witness in Rotherham, were seen as “undesirables”—teens from care homes or otherwise troubled backgrounds. “Police weren’t arsed with us, really,” said one victim from Rochdale, “They don’t give a fuck when you’re not from a wealthy [home].”

Thus, teenage girls faced consistent victim-blaming, with one of them even being arrested on charges of being “drunk and disorderly” after neighbors had heard her screams, and another being dismissed from a police station right into the arms of rapists. News outlets also demonstrated a bizarre willingness to ignore the true nature of grooming and rape. When Azhar Ali Mehmood, 26, burned Lucy Lowe, 16, to death, the BBC described him as her “boyfriend”.

Beyond all this, there was the grotesque, though by no means uncommon, impulse towards prioritizing the interests of institutions above the interests of people. In one memorably sinister email, a council worker in Oldham announced that they had fobbed off the concerns of a journalist who had been looking into the subject of grooming gangs before announcing, “PS. In case you didn’t know: We’ve also won Best City at Northwest in Bloom again today.” Great.

Slowly, the atrocities began to come to light. It is important to be clear that in an ocean of indifference, there were people who did a lot to make this happen, like the whistleblowers Maggie Oliver and Jayne Senior, the journalists Andrew Norfolk and Charlie Peters, and the victims who had the astonishing courage to speak of what they had experienced.

But the scale of the response simply did not match up to the scale of the atrocities. Some of the rapists are already being released. Disgraced officials found cozy jobs elsewhere. No police officers faced serious consequences. Chillingly, files and laptops containing important evidence were stolen. The state avoided accountability while a cultural establishment that emphasized egalitarian and minoritarian narratives avoided the subject. When posts about the grooming gangs scandal went viral on X this week, there was widespread shock. People outside the UK hadn’t even heard about it—and many people within the UK hadn’t grasped its implications.

It is about time that there was a cultural and institutional reckoning. Of course, it is important to be clear that such crimes could still be happening today. It is important to be clear that such crimes can be, and have been, carried out by white people as well (and not for the sake of political correctness but to stop it happening). 

Yet if Britain’s state and cultural institutions are allowed to forget what happened in Rotherham, and Rochdale, and Telford, and Oxford, and Bristol, and so many other places, there will not be meaningful attempts to tear off the ideological and institutional blinkers that have blinded them to atrocities in the past and could blind them to atrocities in the future.

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