Until recently, the British establishment believed that children could consent to sex. In 2001, our national broadcaster referred to the deceased pregnant 16-year-old Lucy Lowe as having been the “girlfriend” of 26-year-old Azhar Ali Mehmood. She was in fact his victim — targeted and groomed from the age of 12. The BBC reported at the time that the taxi driver and schoolgirl “had a stormy relationship and argued frequently.” Mehmood was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Lucy, her sister Sarah Lowe, 17, and her mother 49-year-old Eileen Linda Lowe in a house fire.

It should go without saying that Mehmood is not only a killer, he is a paedophile. Lucy was just 14 when she gave birth to their daughter Tasnim. Thankfully, the infant survived the fire started by her father and has become an outspoken critic of the judiciary’s approach to child sexual abuse. 

As coverage over the past week has made clear, Lucy’s was not an isolated case. Thousands of girls across the UK have been abused, disproportionately by Muslim Pakistani men, in grooming gangs. In many cases, the victims were simply assumed to have consented to the violence to which they were subjected. 

Police officers criminalised the “problem” girls, who were dubbed “child prostitutes” and deemed to be asking for it. Meanwhile, the choices of adult men were left largely unexamined. The professionals who should have protected girls like Lucy buried their responsibility under flabby postmodern concepts ripped straight from academia. It was easier for social workers to look away, to support girls’ agency and their right to engage in “risky behaviours” with multiple grown men. Perhaps this is because choosing to see what was in front of their eyes would’ve not only been politically inconvenient, it would’ve been more personally painful. It’s always much safer, practically and psychologically, to stand by the side of an abuser and not between him and his target. And so “consent”, presumed or stated, became a magic word that transformed child rape into an expression of empowered sexuality. This happened despite the law correctly recognising that children can’t consent to sexual activity. 

Finally, the truth about the scale of exploitation is dawning on the chatterati. Over the past few days, and a few decades too late, a memo has been sent round the dinner party circuit to explain it’s no longer considered racist or impolite to talk about the mass rape of girls by men of Pakistani origin. Even Owen Jones now agrees that it’s “not racist to talk about those scandals”.

The uncomfortable questions don’t stop at race, or even the complicity of institutions and politicians in covering up child rape. Underpinning the lies and excuses professionals told themselves is the fetishisation of the concept of “consent” itself. 

Today, whether the topic is assisted dying, prostitution or BDSM, “consent” is a moral trump card. How it is obtained is rarely examined. Because behind consent there is always a story, and always a power imbalance with the weaker party acquiescing to the stronger. Were this not the case, what we consider “consent” would simply be termed an agreement. This is particularly relevant in the context of grooming gangs when it comes to the sex industry. 

It is well understood that a disproportionate number of women who sell sex have been victimised as children. This is true even of pornography. A 2024 study of 120 pornography performers revealed 88 per cent of participants had experienced sexual abuse as children, a pattern of dehumanisation which of course continues on set. Yet acknowledging that the women groaning on screen might in fact be acting out childhood sexual trauma is dispelled with the magic of consent. No matter how their choices were informed, once they hit 18 and freely walk onto a set everything that led them there or keeps them there is irrelevant. As with wilfully blind police officers and social workers, pornography consumers choose to believe that some women just want to be anally penetrated until they prolapse or choked until they pass out. It’s just easier that way.

Consent … can be a part of the scaffolding of exploitation

Even where a performers’ history is unknown, the onus is always on her, not on the choices of men. Take the infamous OnlyFans content creator Lily Phillips, a 23-year-old who shot to fame after being filmed with 101 men taking turns to penetrate her. Despite Phillips crying after the event, many commentators pointed out that she had consented to the sexually torturous stunt and that she would make money from the content. These are valid points. But few sought to ask why so many men chose to stick their dicks in a woman for what was clearly not a mutually pleasurable experience. Nor why so many pay to watch it, apparently including her father’s friends who were the first to subscribe to her OnlyFans account. The perception of her consent waved away any moral queasiness about the role of the men involved. It is more comforting to view Phillips, who has said of herself “I’m only good for one thing, me”, as empowered.

Consent isn’t just easy to obtain; it can be a part of the scaffolding of exploitation. To return to the murder of Lucy Lowe, her death was used by members of the criminal gang to threaten other children. Others were made to watch brutal rapes which frightened them into compliance. Author and campaigner Lierre Keith argues that “denial, accommodation and consent” are strategies used to withstand oppression:

Anyone on the receiving end of domination learns early in life to stay in line or risk the consequences. Those consequences only have to be applied once in a while to be effective: the traumatized psyche will then police itself. In the battered women’s movement, it’s generally acknowledged that one beating a year will keep a woman down.

Belief in the primacy of “consent” shuts down empathy and reasoning, it stops people viewing acts and asking “is this moral?” The officers who arrested rather than rescued girls, the social workers who called abusers boyfriends and the politicians who dismissed their suffering as inconvenient, all comforted themselves with the myth that the girls consented. This despite the fact they were legally unable to. 

… the perception that consent makes sexual violence acceptable remains largely unchallenged

A quarter of a century on from the murder of Lucy, Sarah and Eileen Lowe some progress has been made. The BBC no longer mindlessly refer to child abusers as girls’ boyfriends and terms like “child prostitute” have fallen out of vogue. But more widely, the perception that consent makes sexual violence acceptable remains largely unchallenged. If we are serious about stopping harm to women and girls, we must begin to question not only why some seem to consent to abuse, but why some men want to hurt women in the first place.