Matt Goodwin, the influential right-wing British political figure has suddenly become laser-focused on the sexual abuse of girls — so long as they are white and their perpetrators are Pakistani Muslim. He also appears to be far more appalled about the organised rape gangs than feminists, including those of us that have been campaigning to end sexual violence towards women and girls for decades. In fact, no-one but Goodwin and other powerful, right-wing bigmouths have done a thing to expose or address the atrocity:

“Instead of doing their job, instead of pursuing truth, instead of throwing light on one of the biggest and darkest scandals in our entire history,” he wrote in his latest Substack, “too many journalists ignored and then downplayed the mass rape and abuse of white working-class children.”

I responded with this thread, and Goodwin responded by demanding I answer a set of questions he posed via a tweet, including, “why did the media devote so much more effort to scandals like George Floyd, Stephen Lawrence, Grenfell than to the industrial scale mass rape of white girls?”

It’s impossible to say exactly how many girls, and boys, have been raped and abused by clergy. A single scandal (the one that resulted in Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby’s resignation) involved abuse that was described by the inquiry as “prolific and abhorrent”, even though it was perpetrated by John Smyth alone. The testimonies of the victims who took part in the inquiry make heartbreaking reading. Many waited more than four decades to disclose the abuse, out of fear of being blamed or disbelieved. Strangely enough, neither Goodwin, or Musk, or the like seem to have mentioned this, or the horrific widespread abuse of girls by those protected within the Catholic Church.

And Musk has not always been so energetic in his condemnation of child abuse. Executives at X (formerly known as Twitter) defended the restoration of an X account after it shared child sexual abuse material in July 2023. Elon Musk, who owns X, personally intervened to reinstate that account, after a violation that would normally result in a permanent ban.

There’s almost nothing left to say about Musk and the other wealthy, right-wing warriors suddenly realising that organised child abuse exists, that working-class girls are poorly served, and that the criminal justice system is unfit for purpose. Almost nothing — except that they are actually focused exclusively on the ethnic origin and religious affiliation of a particular set of abusers, and not really interested in the girls at all. This may seem harsh: who could know what happened, and is still happening, to thousands upon thousands of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised children and not shed a tear? Plenty of people, it would seem. 

I have been aware of the existence of organised child abuse since the 1980s, when it was all but decriminalised. Not only did most men not care — they also refused to make the connection between their own consumption of pornography featuring very young women dressed up in school uniforms, and joined in the countdown to Charlotte Church‘s 16th birthday.

I await news that Musk has donated some of his considerable wealth to support services for abused girls

They judged, they blamed, and they stigmatised girls in care, and girls from families with social service intervention, when — all of a sudden — they were being “promiscuous” down the local pub, “getting themselves pregnant”.

Where I was raised, in a market town in the Northeast, having a black or foreign boyfriend was considered glamorous by the other girls on our rundown housing estate. Some girls were brave (and unsupervised) enough to go out of town to the weekly illegal shebeen, where they would hang out with African Caribbean men — who treated them appallingly because there was no comeback. Because these girls weren’t from their own community, their fathers wouldn’t be coming round to defend their “property” and knock the stuffing out of whoever had knocked her up, or knocked her about. 

I went along to the market with my friends, and although I wasn’t interested in the boys, the other girls would swoon over some of the good-looking young Pakistani men working there, marvelling at how different they were from Barry, Craig, and Allen at our sink school. 

Some bad things happened to those girls. One night me and Susan*, both having told our mums we were staying at each other’s, were invited over to a house where, Susan told me years later, she was “made to have sex”.

At the time, she didn’t dare tell anyone; she knew would’ve been blamed. But — as she told me years later — she would also have been massively stigmatised, seen as damaged goods for having “been with a Paki”.

There’s plenty more to say about this scandal, because lessons haven’t been learned. Nothing was done until a perfect storm of individuals — mothers, victims, survivors, lawyers, feminist campaigners, journalists, whistleblowers — came together to force scrutiny.

Whilst a number of right-wing, wealthy, arrogant men tell me and other feminists we have done nothing about “grooming gangs” — either out of fear of being called racist, or because we couldn’t possibly believe Pakistani Muslims capable of doing such a thing — the hard left are busy calling me racist, putting me on Islamophobia Watch, and telling me I’ve moved to the hard right.

Apparently, I never examined or explored the issue of race or religion in my early exposé — strange, given that it’s the reason the Guardian turned down my piece before the Sunday Times took it on. The left’s virtue signalling was irrelevant to the editor there, who understood it was an important thing to expose.

Thus I am branded a racist, and a capitulator to Islam. What outrages some people is that I refuse to explain away the acts of these men by their skin colour or religion. Not because I’m a virtue-signaller or Robin D’Angelo-style grifter — but because to do so would be inaccurate, offensive and inflammatory.

How easy would it be, if all it took to solve the endemic, ancient problem of men raping and pimping children was to focus on one particular group of men, and deport them? Maybe we could do the same to the BBC, while we’re at it.

In the meantime, I await news that Musk has donated some of his considerable wealth to support services for abused girls, or to Rape Crisis. Perhaps he will denounce Trump’s disgraceful behaviour towards women? Maybe even Epstein and Prince Andrew? 

Some refused to listen to the girls due to cultural relativism, fearing the stoking of racism and anti-immigration sentiment. Others mistrusted the word of feminists like me because we are “man-haters”. But mainly, this is the age-old problem of patriarchy looking after itself by not caring about the abuse of female bodies.