The Rape of Britain: When Does the Mass Rape of Children Become a Real Scandal?

A slightly shortened version of this piece appeared in The Conservative Woman. If you are able to, please support that excellent publication as well as my efforts here.

It’s not accurate to say I want to write about ‘grooming gangs’. I’d much rather not have to, because I would much rather live in a country, in a world, and on a planet where these things didn’t happen.

It would be nice to live in a world where no child is ever raped, and no adult would ever ruin an innocent life. But of course we don’t live in that world. The best we can do is to try to prevent it happening. The best we can do is never be the kind of sick evil bastard that does it. And the best we can do is always be horrified and revolted by it, and always, always, try to defend children from it.

Morally, practically even, that shouldn’t be a lot to ask of ourselves or of society.

This is the most horrific, the most loathsome, the most vile of all crimes. It should be easy to hate it and the people who do it. That hatred of child abuse should not have to be a thing you are taught or persuaded to believe. Everything about a child, whether your own or someone else’s, tells you that they deserve your protection.

But amazingly, some forty years after the first rumours of the industrial scale mass rape of children in my country, and some fifteen years now after the first prosecutions of grooming gang members in Rotherham, we are still dealing not just with these crimes, but with lies and apologies and deflections about these crimes. And we are still waiting for the innocent to have justice, and for the guilty to be punished. We are still waiting for some real honesty, and we are still waiting for the whole thing to be treated as what it is.

It’s not even really a scandal.

After all, how do we define a scandal? It’s normally a thing that causes extensive and furious commentary. It’s a thing that brings down corporations or governments. It’s a media frenzy, followed by an identification of guilty parties, followed by radical changes in leadership or legislation. A scandal requires that people resign, or are fired. It requires that ‘lessons are learned’ and changes made.

A scandal ends political careers.

It’s true that words have been written about grooming gangs and the public have been angered by them. It’s true that, very gradually and reluctantly, the mainstream media and the various governments of the last 20 years have had to commission reports and hold inquiries. It’s true that some truly hideous and shocking truths have emerged about just what level of disgusting crimes occurred and some of the revolting details of those.

But has anyone resigned? Has anyone been sacked? Has government policy changed? Do we think all the grooming gangs have been destroyed, and all the child rapists are in prison?

Two-Tier Morality

In 2020 the Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Ian Hopkins issued an apology after a report revealed that senior GMP officers and officials at Manchester City Council were aware of children being gang raped by gangs but for years did nothing about it. In 2015, five years earlier, a report similarly concluded that officials and police in Oxfordshire had ignored grooming gang child rapes for 16 years. Way back in 2012 The Times reported on a trove of 200 restricted access documents that showed that police and child protection agencies in Rotherham had known about grooming gang child rapes for a decade and, there as elsewhere, ignored these crimes.

We have had political careers end because an adult male minister decided to sleep with a consenting adult sexual partner who was not his wife. People still remember all the lurid details of David Mellor’s affair some 30-odd years ago or other John Major era ‘sex scandals’, all of which were petty personal affairs between consenting adults, yet were enough to mire the Major government in ‘sleaze’ and make it a by-word for corruption and irresponsibility. David Mellor had to resign. Tory sleaze was a key factor in Tony Blair’s first election win.

Can you name a single newspaper that has devoted the same column inches to the brutal mass rape of tens of thousands of girls over decades, that they devoted to David Mellor’s consensual inches intruding on an adult lover in the 1990s?

Or more recently: Boris Johnson was forced to resign for eating a cake at an office party. Yes, he contravened his own insane COVID rules by doing so, but he was still forced from office for eating a cake within a few feet of other people. That was a scandal. A Prime Minister and a government (somewhat later) fell. An 80 seat majority was wiped out. Millions of people still hate the Conservative Party.

Which police chief has resigned because for 30 years they did nothing while thousands of girls were gang raped in horrifically brutal fashions? Which council official has been sacked for ignoring parents, relatives and victims, when we have countless testimonies now over decades of people telling officials what was happening and being rebuffed? Which MP had to step down specifically for anything relating to these crimes and ignoring these crimes?

Labour MPs who (according to other Labour MPs) told people in a threatening manner to shut up about the grooming gangs and to ignore them, still haven’t been sacked or prosecuted for it. A Labour MP who shared a meme mocking grooming gang victims and telling them to shut up for the sake of diversity was promoted and given related portfolios as a shadow minister (by Keir Starmer).

Starmer himself, who was Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008-2013 when grooming gang cases were being refused for prosecution by that office, and when prosecutors were being told not to advance these cases, never lost his job, either then or since. On the contrary, Starmer, while representing the kind of gross betrayal enacted by officialdom throughout the country in relation to the mass rape of mainly white children by mainly Pakistani British men, ended up as Prime Minister.

The Worst Scandal in British History

Being associated, at least in a negligent fashion if not more actively, with mass child rape doesn’t stop you becoming Prime Minister. Eating a cake was a bigger scandal, apparently. This is a reality that says something very, very horrific about our society. In actuality, it says something more broadly horrific than the gross and disgusting crimes themselves, more even than what they say about Pakistani-descended men and their attitudes to white children. Because those grooming gang crimes, that industrial mass rape of our children, should qualify more than anything else ever has as The Worst Scandal in British History.

The most sustained and vile sex crimes in British history. The most disgusting and widespread abuses of the innocent in British history. And, thanks to years and years of denial, as well as years and years of it not really being a scandal and the entire political and media class not really caring about it, the greatest ever betrayal in British history too.

Our officials, our police, our governments, all let our children be raped for decades. What gets worse than that? What constitutes a greater crime than these things happening, and these things being ignored and deliberately trivialised and consciously deflected from?

We had victims go to police stations and be turned away, to be picked up at the police door by their abusers. We had a social worker attend the Islamic ‘wedding’ of a victim to her rapist. We have child rape victims relating how police saw them being raped only to warn them they were at risk of being charged for prostitution and solicitation. We had the police and the Home Office describing and treating children who were victims of beatings, intimidation, death threats, all manner of sexual abuse and group rape involving the most extreme acts, as ‘willing sex workers’, when of course no child can or does consent to being used. We have several reports indicating again and again that officials of all kinds were more worried about ‘community relations’ or being called racist than they were about the victims or the horrific abuse itself.

In the very bleak, very dark 1979 crime movie Scum, which is set in a detention facility for young offenders, there is a terrible scene where one boy is raped by the most brutal prisoner while being held down by his gang of accomplices. One of the truly vile aspects of this scene is that a warden is fully aware of what happens. He knows the victim has been chased down and raped. He knows exactly what has happened and he treats it with a mixture of amusement, irritation and disgust, without a shred of sympathy for the victim and without a thought of punishment for the rapist. This is just something that happens to scum. The warden is disgusted that the victim has let it happen and is in a sobbing state afterwards. The message is clear. The authorities are scum too, just as brutal as the worst rapist in that facility. The victim kills himself, but nothing happens to anyone else.

This is pretty much a microcosm of what has happened in Britain to grooming gang victims. The authorities were complicit in it, they were part of it. Even those who were not in place and knowingly turning a blind eye became and have become part of it because of our horrifically uncaring, reduced, dishonest societal response to these crimes. The decades of silence were a crime, as well as the decades of abuse. The refusal to prosecute rapists because they were Muslim and Asian, and the refusal to be honest about that afterwards too, were crimes added by the media and by the government to the crimes of the rapists.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Government Statistics

Think first about what happened, and is still happening. Think about the full scale of it.

First, the scale. The former Labour MP Sarah Champion once suggested that there had been up to a million child rape and abuse victims of grooming gangs in Britain. She was derided by some for that claim, but even the final official IICSA report issued in 2022 admitted that there had been “tens of thousands of victims”. The Jay Report of 2014 confirmed 1,400 victims in Rotherham alone in a 16 year period between 1997-2013. In Telford, news reports and official estimates cite over 1,000 victims.

How about range? The 2022 IICSA report confirmed grooming gang abuses, and active and past grooming gang activity “in all parts of the country”. Grooming gangs have been detected and prosecuted in towns and cities throughout the North and South. Child rape gangs trafficked victims between cities. Rotherham, Durham, Rochdale, Liverpool, Manchester, Oldham, Leeds – but the Midlands and the South as well, Brighton, Bristol, London, Swansea, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Warwickshire, north, south, east and west.

If some official reports admit it must have happened pretty much everywhere…that’s hundreds of towns, any town with a Pakistani-descended population, where it could still be happening. And thousands of never acknowledged victims, too.

Second, the denial. I’ve already spoken about how vile it is that the police ignored these crimes or turned away victims. Well, it’s vile that we don’t have the names of those officers, and we haven’t seen those people punished. We have victims telling us how they were treated, and we have police chiefs apologising, but we haven’t had – so far as I know – any specific exposures or sackings related to these gross betrayals of public trust and public duty.

But that’s not the only denial we’re faced with.

In 2020, as public awareness of grooming gangs reached tipping point, starting to apply real pressure on the political elite who would rather bury it as much as possible or pretend that it’s been dealt with and can now be forgotten, we saw a loathsome exercise in media and academic deflection, enabled by the Home Office.

The Jay Report was never centred solely on grooming gangs, but covered child sexual abuse more generally. The same applied to the IICSA and its series of reports. That’s why the 20 recommendations put forward by Professor Jay include things like tackling online child sex grooming and reform of child care services and institutions, informed by looking at abuse in care homes and the care system. All of that work was necessary and good, and of course all child sexual abuse is vile and must be dealt with.

But in 2020 we saw a direct contradiction of earlier reports which had been honest on the ethnic and religious composition of the street level grooming gangs. In 2018 for instance West Yorkshire Police and a series of trials at Leeds Crown Court regarding grooming gangs in Huddersfield were honest about these crimes fitting “the pattern of large-scale exploitation of mainly white girls by groups of men of mainly Pakistani heritage”. The 2015 IICSA report was also honest, saying that it was “undeniable” that the child rapists were mainly Pakistani and the victims mainly white.

But in 2020 we saw a deliberate Establishment media, academic and official campaign to do something similar to what the decades of not talking about grooming gangs at all had done much earlier. No longer able to engage in the kind of “conspiracy of silence” that Andrew Norfolk bravely talked about in The Times in 2011, having failed to silence public response to the issue by repeatedly imprisoning Tommy Robinson and calling opposition to mass child rape racist, the same old ideological biases and fears regarding ‘community tension’ seem to have driven a decision to try to deliberately obscure the racial truth on these crimes.

I believe the publication of the 2020 Home Office report Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation: Characteristics of Offending, December 2020, was a deliberate attempt to obscure the truth on grooming gangs. It was designed to give ‘evidence’ for mainstream media to run with when lying about the nature of grooming gangs, because the British political and establishment classes do not want to face or deal with the truth. Further, they consider the public awareness of the truth to be the thing they most need to suppress (far more than they care about preventing child rapes). What this report stated was that most child sex offences are committed by white men. It put that ‘fact’ front and foremost, quite deliberately, and concluded that there was no evidence that any other demographics were particularly linked with child sexual grooming and child rape.

In order to do this, the Home Office report ignored the more relevant fact that it is not the number of offenders from a particular ethnicity or background alone that tells us the full truth on these offences, but the relative proportion and frequency of these offences within that group adjusted for their share of the overall population that does so. It’s not that there are more white child rapists in a population where 80% or 90% of people are white, but whether the number exceeds what would be expected of the population. It’s not that there is a lower number of Pakistani-descended men convicted of child sex offences, it’s whether those men are proportionately more likely to rape children, given the number of offenders compared to their much lower overall population share. And it deliberately contradicted all the prior information on grooming gangs (whether from confirmed cases showing no white participants in exclusively Pakistani Muslim rape gangs or whether from statistical analysis in earlier reports) to deliver its ‘mainly white abusers’ message.

The Home Office was distorting the presentation of data in order to minimise Pakistani and Muslim child rape, and in order to demonise white males. Now I don’t have a smoking gun here exclusively proving that this was by design, but I have decades of evidence of prior lying and concealment, combined with the nature of officials who were earlier happy to see child victims characterised as sluts and prostitutes, to go by. This interpretation of the Home Office reports conclusions and methods, and most damningly its intentions, is totally consistent with two-tier policing, with racially discriminating guidelines on sentencing, and with the following actions of the Starmer government which would share and even extend this kind of race based dishonesty.

As could have been predicted, and I believe was the intention, the 2020 Home Office report was taken up throughout media to try to pretend that what everyone knew to be real wasn’t real, and that the uniform consistency of Pakistani Muslim names and appearances in the role-call of convicted grooming gang child rapists was an illusion. The Huffington Post led with ‘Child Grooming Gang Members Mainly White Men, Home Office Finds’, while The Guardian and University College London both published a triumphant article by Dr Ella Cockbain and Dr Waqas Tufal titled ‘A New Home Office Report Admits Grooming Gangs Are Not a ‘Muslim Problem’.’

This article made very clear the agenda at work, which was to use the Home Office report to ‘explode the myth’ that grooming gangs were Pakistani Muslim men raping white girls – even though it was no myth at all. Everything in the Home Office report and the Guardian article was a distortion, a refusal to admit the already established facts:

“For many in Britain today the term “grooming gang” immediately suggests Pakistani-heritage Muslim men abusing white girls, but the Home Office researchers now tell us that “research has found that group-based offenders are most commonly White”.

A powerful modern racial myth has been exploded. What started as a far-right trope had migrated into the mainstream, meeting little resistance along the way. In 2011, the Times and its chief investigative reporter, Andrew Norfolk, claimed to have uncovered a new ethnic crime threat, shrouded until then in a supposed “conspiracy of silence”.

The racial stereotype gained credence when the Quilliam Foundation, a controversial “counter-extremism” group, claimed that 84% of “grooming gang offenders” were Asian.

The “grooming gangs” narrative fed into the agenda of the far right, but it was not only there that the issue was racialised: the Labour MP Sarah Champion, for one, wrote a now notorious article in the Sun in 2017, for which she resigned as shadow equalities minister.

The two-year study by the Home Office makes very clear that there are no grounds for asserting that Muslim or Pakistani-heritage men are disproportionately engaged in such crimes, and, citing our research, it confirmed the unreliability of the Quilliam claim.”

This gleeful contradiction of the ‘Far Right narrative’ was, in reality, precisely what the report was designed to supply so that this latest lie could be filtered through the media and through academia. It lent confirmation to their own refusal to see Muslim sex crimes and their own anti-white prejudices, and was taken up by everyone from James O’Brien to Jess Phillips.

I shouldn’t have to tell you that it’s incredibly evil to first refuse to see children being raped because the children are white and the rapists aren’t, then to allow these rapes to continue for decades while ignoring the victims, and then to distort data to pretend that the group doing the rapes have been unfairly maligned when the truth finally gets out. But this is what our police, Home Office and governments and media engaged in. So much so that in 2023 when a non-white politician, Kemi Badenoch, returned to the accurate assessment of the origin of most street level grooming gang child rapists, she too was attacked as a racist.

All of this relates to more general attitudes of both terrified submission towards non-white groups and particularly to anything related to Islam, and to fashionable middle and upper class loathing of the white working class who have been the main victims of grooming gangs. If we look at the way the Starmer government both massively over-reacts to white protest in hypocritically racist terms, and sought to pretend that the chief threat to child safety comes from white boys influenced by Andrew Tate, we see the same prejudices at work.

The Starmer government treated a fictional Netflix show about an imaginary white 13-year-old killer as real, requiring rapid immediate responses and educational changes, having just spent months trying to avoid a full national enquiry into the mass rape of real white victims for decades by real mainly Pakistani Muslim men. From October 2024, when Jess Phillips sent a letter to Oldham Council denying a request for a grooming gang inquiry, through to January 2025 when every single Labour MP voted against a national enquiry amendment put to vote in the Commons, the Labour Party were fighting strenuously to deny a national enquiry on grooming gangs.

Thirty years after the ‘scandal’ first broke, a sitting government was headed by a Prime Minister with a personally terrible record on the matter, and which was actively seeking to impose a new silence on it. At every level the British political Establishment and officialdom have acted as enablers and apologists for Pakistani Muslim rapists, and as contemptuous crooked wardens, more disgusted with the victims for telling the truth than with the rapists for abusing children.

It’s been the most sustained and complete race-based crime in British history, the worst sexual depravity we have ever seen on these shores, and the most loathsome stain on our national reputation and social cohesion, both for the disgusting nature of the crimes themselves and for the continued official avoidance of honesty regarding who the victims are and who the criminals are.

The Rape of Britain occurred with tacit and sometimes explicit official approval. It was considered better that it be so, because the children who were raped were white and their suffering does not matter half so much as elite horror at the thought of offending Muslims or agreeing with Tommy Robinson.

It seems to me that this scandal, without ever having the consequences or honest coverage of an acknowledged scandal, has just got worse and worse. British society as a whole, and certainly our middle class and our Establishment, have acted like the ‘Muslim community’-knowing the crimes, tacitly and sometimes explicitly supporting them, and urging silence and threatening those who speak out. It’s estimated now that 1 in 11 Pakistani descended men in the UK took part in (or still are) these child rapes. That’s not a figure you will hear from anyone in authority, but it’s probably an underestimate. In the last 20 years recorded rapes have increased by ten times the old average figures. Millions more men from cultures with appalling sexual attitudes have been added to the population. Convicted rapists have been released at the end of their sentences back into the same towns where they tortured and abused girls. And our current government increasingly imprisons people for talking about any of this or being critical in any way of migrant groups associated with it. It is extending censorship and tyranny on the whole issue, rather than ever truly dealing with most of the rapists.

Under the terms of the Online Harms Act and the forthcoming Crime and Policing Act, an offended person could get someone else imprisoned for two years with very little due process, with no proper evidence, trial or investigation, for factually describing the mass rapes the way I am doing here. All it would need is one leftist progressive judge, and we have plenty of those.