Grooming gangs and the truth

The grooming gang phenomenon in the UK is one of the most appalling stains on British history. In places like Rotherham — but also Telford, Rochdale, Oxford and elsewhere — thousands of vulnerable girls were raped and sexually trafficked. Meanwhile, the authorities — wallowing in a stew of political correctness, classism and corruption — stood by and ignored or actually enabled it. A “conspiracy of murmuring”, as I have written, meant that British children were grotesquely betrayed.

A disproportionate number of the perpetrators have had South Asian — and, especially, Pakistani — heritage. This was not incidental to their crimes but helped to shape them, with many victims reporting that they were subjected to anti-white abuse.

Decades of mainstream denial and disingenuousness have failed to obscure these facts. But the weight of that denial and disingenuousness — as well as sheer principle — should lead us to be very careful in our arguments. 

Alas, the “Rape Gang Inquiry Report”, published yesterday, is far from careful. One can certainly forgive its authors for some element of unprofessionalism, given that the relevant professionals in the UK — from police officers to politicians — have so disgracefully sat on their hands. But that should not extend to the publication of claims which are not factual.

“It has been previously established,” claims the report: 

… that, at the very least, 250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma.

As others have pointed out, this has in no sense been established. It takes the case of Rotherham, where at least 1400 girls are estimated to have been victimised, and extends it over the country. But there is no reason to believe that Rotherham experienced the average amount of criminality. Even cities which contained infamous grooming gangs, like Oxford, did not experience that level of victimisation.

This cavalier use of stats is a problem later in the report, when its authors dabble in some cross-country comparisons. “The number of reported rapes in the United Kingdom has risen substantially since 1997,” they write:

In stark contrast, Poland, which maintained relatively low levels of immigration throughout the same period, has experienced a decline in reported rapes.

Listen, I love Poland (indeed, I live there). Nor do I deny that mass migration can lead to elevated numbers of sex crimes. But this comparison is highly problematic. If we’re to believe the statistics in the report, the UK has more than 30 times more rapes than Poland. Does that sound plausible to you? The problem is that countries collect rape statistics in different ways. If we’re to believe official statistics, for example, Albania is a paradise for women in comparison with, say, Iceland. So, as I’ve written before:

Some European nations, like the UK and Ireland, define rape as the lack of consent. Some, like Poland, define it as requiring force or the threat of force.

Additionally:

In the UK, trust in the police is slightly higher than in Poland — I’m not sure why but it is what it is — and trust in the courts is slightly higher as well. So, we can expect that people will be more willing to report crimes.

It is, finally, dubious for the report to place such a heavy causative emphasis on Islam. This is not to claim that Islam was not a factor. But as Chris Bayliss has written for The Critic, what seems to have mattered more is “tightly-knit kinship networks” that enable something like a communitarian form of organised crime.

This last point can be debated. Indeed, all of this can be debated. I’m sure the authors of this report did not intend for it to be the final word on the subject. What is extremely grim, though, is some defenders of the report — and, to be clear, I do not mean its authors — claiming that it is okay not to be rigorous or truthful because “we are the good guys”. What a betrayal of the victims who, in the face of establishment denial, have only ever had the truth — and what a gift to hand to deniers, who will be delighted to bury the subject under a pile of accusations of “disinformation”.

It is good that this scandal has received more attention in recent years. I can’t emphasise enough that it is an all-time historical scandal, in terms of the crimes themselves and in terms of their enablement by the authorities, whatever the precise statistics might be. But let’s do our best to be accurate. It honours the victims, and it fulfils the best of our potential, and there really is no downside.