The Rape of Britain

Due to an odd hiccup of public discourse in the social media age, many Americans are now discovering what is known in the UK as the “grooming gang scandal,” a tame title for what may well be remembered as one of the most vile and tyrannical atrocities ever visited by a democratically elected government upon its own citizens. 

The scandal itself is over a decade old, with reports that shook the British public first breaking into public consciousness in 2013, but by some vagary of history and chance—heightened populist anger over immigration, changes to the media landscape, the reelection of Donald Trump, the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk—the scandal has gone viral on Anglophone social media at the dawn of 2025. Even many Brits who knew of the scandal’s existence have been shocked by the details now entering public awareness for the first time.

The events themselves are so horrible as to be almost inconceivable. From the late ’80s to the present, tens of thousands of young British girls, most between the ages of 10 and 15, have been raped, abused, and forcibly prostituted by gangs of Pakistani Muslim men in the UK. British authorities, from the local police to the town council to members of Parliament, were not only aware of the abuses taking place, but obstructed attempts to stop the horrific crimes, bring perpetrators to justice, or allow the public to become aware of the situation, all in order to prevent “racial unrest” from taking place.

The numbers themselves are awful to contemplate; some estimates put the total number of victims at as much as 250,000. The details of the abuse are worse still. Girls were raped with broken bottles, branded, sold out by their abusers dozens or even hundreds of times. Others were passed around between friends and family—brothers, uncles, and cousins all abusing the same victim. Some were doused with gasoline and threatened with lit matches. Many had their families threatened with rape, torture, or murder. Some were murdered in horrific ways themselves. Others were forced to recruit new victims.

This occurred with the complicity of the British state. When girls reported their abuse to local law enforcement, they were told there was nothing that could be done and turned away. Police refused to open criminal investigations, arguing that girls as young as 11 were engaging in consensual sex. When parents understood that the police would not help them, they attempted to remove their daughters from the hands of their rapists personally, only to end up arrested themselves. In at least one case, police encountered a young girl who was being abused by seven men, and arrested her for drunk and disorderly conduct while leaving the men to go free.

Various attempts to draw officials’ attention to the issue were ignored: Independent researchers were sidelined, official government reports were suppressed. When one investigator, who was hired to investigate sexual abuse cases in 2001, submitted a report pointing out that the issue was almost entirely contained within the Pakistani Muslim community, she was told by an official “you must never refer to that again” and was then assigned to take a two-day ethnicity and diversity course “to raise [her] awareness of ethnic issues.” Police officers, government officials, and media figures worked constantly to obscure the nature and perpetrators of the abuses, neglecting to classify or report the ethnicities of criminals, obscuring data to avoid drawing obvious conclusions, and declaring that any such allegations constituted a “moral panic” being exploited by racists and the far right. A 2004 documentary for Channel 4, which had been made to highlight the issue of gang rape and child sexual abuse, was delayed after local police and “anti-fascist” nonprofits alleged it would “incite racial violence.”

Modern Western political systems assume that the state serves as an extension of a single nation: a common civic body with a relatively uniform sociocultural background, fundamental moral, religious, and political beliefs, and common bonds of history, affection, and language. Only such a society is capable of self-government.

Those assumptions are now being tested. Many people disdain the traditional bonds and bounds of the nations. Advances in modern technology have made mass migration simple at the same time as they make integration far more difficult; migrants can, by modern transportation and telecommunications, maintain their family ties, language, culture, and media with little inconvenience. Changes in sociopolitical combinations make immigration ever more economically enticing, as falling birth rates collide with a welfare system that depends on economic growth and a high ratio of workers to dependents. 

In the West, accordingly, nearly all countries have chosen to allow unprecedented masses of immigrants from distant ethnicities and cultures entry and citizenship in their countries, hoping to stave off demographic and economic decline and maintain the solvency of their welfare systems.

It has been, almost everywhere, an unpopular decision. The broader populace has never been particularly favorable to mass migration with its accompanying crime, urban disorder, ghettoization, and, in Europe, the rise of Islamic terrorism and political extremism. But the ruling classes are, by their nature, largely insulated from these concerns. Safe in gated communities and protected by private security, politicians on both sides of the aisle were able to hand the costs of immigration to the lower classes while reaping the benefits themselves.

But that doesn’t mean they have been unaware of the costs. Indeed, elites are keenly aware of the potential dangers of mass immigration. They have, accordingly, expended vast amounts of effort and money on “managing racial tensions,” deploying educational initiatives, nonprofits, media campaigns, regulations and incentives for private corporations, and of course the organs of state to clamp down on potential conflict between natives and newcomers. Disturbers of the peace are suppressed, dismissed, ostracized, and even arrested, some for no greater a crime than speaking their opinion. (The UK lacking the robust freedom of speech protections of the First Amendment, imprisonment for speech posted on the internet is routine). 

The tens of thousands of young British girls raped, tortured, and abused by Pakistanis were simply the necessary sacrifices required to maintain the new, multicultural, postnational state in the UK. Their suffering was less important than the maintenance of social harmony required by the modern sociopolitical arrangement that has succeeded postwar Britain.

Of course, much, perhaps even most of the behavior—by police, political, or media figures—was not a conscious attempt to buy social harmony at the expense of child rape. A few British officials innocently accepted the religious outlook of modern progressivism, which places the provocation of racism in society as the chief sin. Far more importantly, all were aware that, whatever their own opinions on the matter, that religious outlook carries the sanction of state—officials who looked too closely into potentially inflammatory cases might soon find themselves facing allegations of wrongdoing. The police were already familiar with such accusations: The Macpherson Report of 1999 had tarred the Metropolitan Police Service with being guilty of “institutional racism” for its handling of the murder of the black man Stephen Lawrence in 1993.

But the crimes are too numerous, the evidence too damning, for those involved to maintain any kind of innocence, even if there was not a conspiracy. The officers and politicians were well aware of the horrific crimes they were abetting, whether their intentions were for the “good of society” or to preserve their own skins. “There must have been councillors and MPs, I think, all over the country who knew what was going on but were terrified,” said Anne Cryer, a politician who unsuccessfully advocated for investigation into sexual abuse cases by Pakistani men in her district in 2002. “It’s a genuine fear, to be terrified of being labelled a racist. No one wants to be called a racist, least of all someone who isn’t a racist.”

It may have been unwise, in the long run, to have attempted to preserve racial harmony by enabling horrific, racialized abuses against the native population. But the logic of the multicultural society requires that the state and organs of elite opinion privilege minorities and clamp down on potentially divisive events. The remaking of the nation requires a moral reordering, and the new code must place diversity and ethnic harmony as the chief virtues and racism as the chief vice if the new mode and order is to function. Else, they might legitimize a rejection of multiculturalism in light of some higher social good—such as the protection of children.

Nor was it necessarily a bad bet. The scandal has broken its bounds today, but up until the beginning of this week, it seemed to have been well contained. We are now more than 10 years from the day the news broke that the British government was complicit in the systematic rape of thousands of girls; what consequences have been suffered by the guilty? 

None whatsoever. No one has been prosecuted for their complicity in these awful crimes. No police officer so much as lost their job over the matter. The political consequences have been minute—the head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 to 2013, when the scandal broke, was none other than Keir Starmer, currently Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The mainstream press coverage of the scandal was extant but minimal, and draconian laws concerning the publicization of criminal trials meant that many of the worst details came out only quietly after the fact. 

Even the criminals themselves—rapists, torturers, murderers—have gotten off lightly. Many of them received sentences of ten years or less, and have already returned to sully the streets of Britain.

In the face of such execrable injustice—the destruction of tens of thousands of innocent young girls with the very government which is responsible for their safekeeping aiding and abetting—what can be done? The people of Britain would be more than justified in erecting once again the famous gallows of Tyburn and leaving such a memorial as would not be soon forgotten either by criminals or counsellors or chiefs of police. But, for better or worse, more “civilized” means are likely to be the British people’s only recourse. The advocacy of Musk and the American right, which has grasped the monstrosity of the events and is unimpeded by the stifling speech laws of the UK, will provide a great benefit for those seeking such a reckoning. At the very least, the political and personal consequences must be severe. Inquiries are insufficient; if the facilitators of these vicious crimes are not to meet the end of a rope, they must at least suffer the interior of the cell.

Perhaps most importantly, the people of Britain must force their political leaders to reject once and for all the deleterious project of the multicultural society, the proverbial house divided. Ethnic strife, declining social trust, the proliferation of crime, the alienation of the native population from its homeland, the suppression of speech and opinion, and finally the cooperation of government with foreign rapists and abusers against its own citizens are the fruits of such a social order. The multicultural project is in rebellion against human nature; it can only be maintained by a state that systematically lies, oppresses its own citizens, and disregards the vulnerable it has a responsibility to protect.

It must not last.

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