Ignore the grooming gangs deniers

The Jay Report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham was published over a decade ago. The report exposed in gory detail both the brutality and enormous scale of abuse that took place in the town by grooming gangs of mostly Pakistani men. It also highlighted how “concern that the ethnic element could damage community cohesion” and “nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist” influenced the Council’s actions (or rather lack thereof). In light of the findings, one of the report’s recommendations is that “The issue of race should be tackled as an absolute priority if it is a significant factor in the criminal activity of organised child sexual abuse”.

Despite the unambiguous recommendation to tackle the racial dimension of the grooming gangs head on, the report’s publication failed to mark a turning point in which squeamishness about identifying the ethnic pattern of abusers was finally overcome in order to better protect children. Instead, denial about there being any particular ethnic pattern in offending continued, and to this day it is still commonly denied that there was a specific issue within the Pakistani community that led to the widespread participation by its members in some of the most brutal crimes against children this country has ever undergone. 

So how can denial about there being a clear pattern of Pakistani grooming gangs continue after Rotherham, and Rochdale, and Halifax, and Telford, and Oxford, and Aylesbury, and so on and so on? Through lies and distortions.

One form of distortion is to minimise the scale of the crimes that took place, using phrases such as “a few gangs” to suggest it was only ever a limited issue. This form of minimisation was repeated on the hugely popular The Rest is Politics podcast, where host Rory Stewart attempted to explain to his audience why there was such outrage over the grooming gangs, and only mentioned that there were gangs in Rotheram and Rochdale, referring to there as being “tens of perpetrators”. In truth, there have been grooming gangs revealed in over fifty locations around Britain, with the number of perpetrators likely to be in the tens of thousands, meaning Stewart minimised the number of abusers by a factor of around a thousand.

Another form of narrative distortion is to dishonestly use “statistics” to prove that there is no particular overrepresentation of Pakistanis in perpetrator breakdowns, supposedly proving that mentioning Pakistanis is therefore arbitrarily picking them out, likely for racist reasons. Data compiled in a report by the CSA Centre, which breaks down the ethnicities of defendants of child sex crimes, shows that 88 per cent were white, with only 2 per cent being Pakistani. This has been used to argue that grooming gangs are actually a predominantly white phenomenon, and that the attention of Pakistani perpetrators has been selective and racially motivated.

But the data used is for all child sex crimes, not specifically grooming gang related crimes. Reading the report fully, rather than just grabbing the headline figure, shows that the largest category in the data is for indecent images, and that more than a third of all offences were “child on child”. This suggests that a portion of the offences are children sexting each other with explicit images. Of course, all child sex offences are bad in their own right, but teenagers sending each other nude images and pre-teens being drugged, kidnapped and gang raped are in no way comparable in either severity or harm. So highlighting data on the ethnic origins of perpetrators for all child sex offences is a complete distraction, cynically shifting attention away from the specific issues of group-based child sexual exploitation to make claims about the predominantly white make-up of child sex offenders that no one ever disputed.

The reason the ethnic dynamic is worth mentioning is that it was not merely incidental, but integral

Even when the data is narrowed down to specifically group based child sexual exploitation, claims that the data “proves” most offenders are white fail to mention that in the most recent data, where collection standards have been raised, ethnicity was only recorded for 34 per cent of perpetrators. In other words, even today the ethnicity of a significant majority of offenders is not recorded. And even if it were recorded in all cases, there remains the issue of just how few perpetrators are ever identified, let alone brought to justice. Individual victims were sometimes abused by hundreds of men, yet would be lucky if even just a handful ever faced criminal proceedings. Accurate data on the ethnic profile of all offenders will likely never be available, so claims of undeniable proof that most grooming gang members were not Pakistani is speculative at best.

What is not speculative is that there have been dozens of prosecuted grooming gangs where most, if not all, of the abusers were Pakistani. The reason the ethnic dynamic is worth mentioning is that it was not merely incidental, but integral to explaining why these crimes were committed in the first place and why those in power chose to turn a blind eye.

Testimonies from numerous victims describe their Pakistani tormentors referring to them with racial slurs like “white slag”, “white whore”, and others far more explicit. One survivor of the Rotherham grooming gang described the mentality of her abusers as follows:

White girls and non-Muslim girls are bad because you dress like slags. You show the curves of your bodies (showing the gap between your thighs means you’re asking for it) and therefore you’re immoral. White girls sleep with hundreds of men. You are the other girls. You are worthless and you deserve to be gang-raped.

The claim that abusers harboured feelings of racial superiority over their white victims doesn’t even need to be deduced from a collage of alleged quotes and behaviours — the leader of the Rochdale grooming gang, Shabir Ahmed, shared his feelings of racial superiority and hatred towards white people quite explicitly. At his trial, in front of the judge, jury, and journalists, the child rapist declared “We are the supreme race, not these white bastards … You destroyed my community and our children. None of us did that. White people trained those girls to be so much advanced in sex.” 

Race was therefore not an incidental factor, but a motivating factor. The victims of these Pakistani grooming gangs were preyed upon because they were girls, because they were vulnerable, but also because they were white. In any other context, or with the racial dynamics switched out for any other permutation, these crimes would rightly and uncontroversially be labelled as racially aggravated. To deny this racial element through distortions and lies must therefore be called out as the dangerous atrocity denial that it is.