It’s the scandal that refuses to die. Despite the best efforts of our spineless elites – who’d rather talk about anything on Earth other than grooming gangs – it keeps creeping back. For all the left’s cheap, libellous cries about how racist it is to talk about these gangs, people keep talking about them. In the face of official indifference to the suffering of thousands of poor and working-class girls at the hands of these groomers and abusers, people have demanded a reckoning. There is a public thirst for truth, and no amount of top-down slander and censure can crush it.
Three days into 2025, grooming gangs are back in the news. As British readers will know, ‘grooming gangs’ is the somewhat euphemistic name given to those marauding bands of men from mostly Pakistani backgrounds who subjected girls of the white working class to horrific abuse. In towns across the UK – Rotherham, Rochdale, Huddersfield, Oldham, Telford, Oxford – gangs of men plied girls with drugs, demeaned them, exploited them, raped them. Conservative MP Robert Jenrick has a point when he says the flat phrase ‘grooming gangs’ seems designed to ‘sanitise depraved crimes’. They’re ‘rape gangs’, he says.
They were. The girls who fell victim to these gangs experienced the most hellish degradation. The men ‘deliver[ed] them to hell’, as one prosecutor put it. In Huddersfield, girls were ‘passed around and raped’. In Manchester, a girl was injected with heroin to make her easier to rape. In Rochdale, a girl called Ruby was raped a hundred times from the age of 12. She had an abortion at 13. There were thousands of victims: 1,400 in Rotherham, 1,000 in Telford, more than 300 in Oxford. It was an industry of sexual violence.
What made these horrors even worse – and in some cases what made them possible – was the calculated indifference of officialdom. Across England, local politicians and cops were initially loath to dig into the gangs, lest they stir up ‘sensitive community issues’. They knew very well that gangs of men from Pakistani backgrounds were preying on white girls from the dirt-poor parts of town, but they held back because they didn’t want to be seen as ‘targeting [a] minority group’. In town after town, ‘race relations’ were elevated above the safety and dignity of working-class girls. Protecting the ideology of multiculturalism was seen as more important than protecting girls from rape. The girls were sacrificed to ideology, their humiliation treated as a small price to pay for upholding the edicts of political correctness.
Now, this outrage is making waves again. It follows Home Office minister Jess Phillips’s rejection of Oldham Council’s request for a government-led inquiry into the ‘grooming gangs’ scourge. The fearless reportage of Charlie Peters at GB News has also helped to drag these sick crimes back into the spotlight. Elon Musk is stirring it up too, cack-handedly, using X to slam Keir Starmer’s government and Britain more broadly for our failures over what he calls this ‘rape genocide’. That our media ‘hid’ these atrocities for so long is awful, he says.
There’s historical erasure at play here. Mr Musk, and others, might have first heard about the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal in 2025, but Brits have been aware of it for years. It was the mainstream media that uncovered it. For years The Times was all over this story. Julie Bindel wrote about it as far back as 2007. Spiked has covered it in depth for more than a decade. The idea that we need a rich rabble-rouser in America to pry open our eyes to our nation’s legion crimes and failures is ridiculous. Here’s my question for those feverishly tweeting about these ‘grooming gangs’ they’ve just discovered – where have you been?
This horror hasn’t been ‘hidden’. It’s been the subject of much media scrutiny and righteous public fury. But here’s the curious thing, the worrying thing: while there’s been a great deal of reportage on ‘grooming gangs’, there hasn’t been the reckoning we really need. While there have been numerous local inquiries – all cataloguing the gross failures of officials who showed more concern for communal peace than female safety – still the scandal rarely troubles the broader political conscience. Everyone knows about it, but few dwell on it. In polite society it is the great unmentionable, the atrocity that dare not speak its name. You wring your hands over it, and nothing more. You agree it was bad, and you move on.
It’s not hard to see why a culture of cowardice still clings to this scandal more than any other – it’s because the questions it raises about 21st-century Britain are legion, profound and terrifying. Thousands of girls subjected to vile abuse while officialdom, the police, the left and even many feminists looked the other way because they value communal calm more than working-class life and dignity? No wonder they wish this scandal would go away. No wonder they’re content to acknowledge it but never interrogate it. No wonder they’re more comfortable talking about a Tory MP putting his hand on a middle-class journalist’s knee. They simply lack the psychological and moral resources to reflect on what it says about their rule that thousands of poor and working-class girls were raped right under the nose of their bureacracy.
It isn’t because they think the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal is insignificant that they avoid dwelling on it. On the contrary, it is precisely the mammoth nature of the scandal, the vast and swirling questions it raises, that makes them so allergic to grappling with it. This is without question one of the great outrages of the postwar period. It is the moment the state failed, catastrophically, in its most basic duty: to protect its citizens from harm. It’s the scandal that exposes the sinister self-preserving instincts of the bureaucratic elites, who we now know will do anything to protect their ideology and influence, including turning a blind eye to the rape of destitute girls. They shout ‘racist!’ at anyone who talks about ‘grooming gangs’ because they know our pesky questions threaten to unravel their moral pretensions and shatter their political authority. They know what’s at stake.
For nothing exposes the dangerous aloofness of Britain’s new ruling class as much as the ‘grooming’ scandal does. This scandal speaks to their classism, cowardice and deep distrust of us, the public. Every step of the way in this horror, they were guided by their fear of the masses, their dread of the plebs. From their panic about stirring up ‘Islamophobia’ to their fear of fuelling the ‘far right’, they confirmed, again and again, their view of everyday Brits as a mob-in-waiting, as so bigoted and volatile that we cannot be trusted with the truth about these gangs, or anything else. They failed working-class girls and then demeaned the whole public. They treated poor girls as trash and then trashed the right of everyone else to protest against it. This scandal is far from over. It has only just begun.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
They were. The girls who fell victim to these gangs experienced the most hellish degradation. The men ‘deliver[ed] them to hell’, as one prosecutor put it. In Huddersfield, girls were ‘passed around and raped’. In Manchester, a girl was injected with heroin to make her easier to rape. In Rochdale, a girl called Ruby was raped a hundred times from the age of 12. She had an abortion at 13. There were thousands of victims: 1,400 in Rotherham, 1,000 in Telford, more than 300 in Oxford. It was an industry of sexual violence.
What made these horrors even worse – and in some cases what made them possible – was the calculated indifference of officialdom. Across England, local politicians and cops were initially loath to dig into the gangs, lest they stir up ‘sensitive community issues’. They knew very well that gangs of men from Pakistani backgrounds were preying on white girls from the dirt-poor parts of town, but they held back because they didn’t want to be seen as ‘targeting [a] minority group’. In town after town, ‘race relations’ were elevated above the safety and dignity of working-class girls. Protecting the ideology of multiculturalism was seen as more important than protecting girls from rape. The girls were sacrificed to ideology, their humiliation treated as a small price to pay for upholding the edicts of political correctness.
Now, this outrage is making waves again. It follows Home Office minister Jess Phillips’s rejection of Oldham Council’s request for a government-led inquiry into the ‘grooming gangs’ scourge. The fearless reportage of Charlie Peters at GB News has also helped to drag these sick crimes back into the spotlight. Elon Musk is stirring it up too, cack-handedly, using X to slam Keir Starmer’s government and Britain more broadly for our failures over what he calls this ‘rape genocide’. That our media ‘hid’ these atrocities for so long is awful, he says.
There’s historical erasure at play here. Mr Musk, and others, might have first heard about the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal in 2025, but Brits have been aware of it for years. It was the mainstream media that uncovered it. For years The Times was all over this story. Julie Bindel wrote about it as far back as 2007. Spiked has covered it in depth for more than a decade. The idea that we need a rich rabble-rouser in America to pry open our eyes to our nation’s legion crimes and failures is ridiculous. Here’s my question for those feverishly tweeting about these ‘grooming gangs’ they’ve just discovered – where have you been?
This horror hasn’t been ‘hidden’. It’s been the subject of much media scrutiny and righteous public fury. But here’s the curious thing, the worrying thing: while there’s been a great deal of reportage on ‘grooming gangs’, there hasn’t been the reckoning we really need. While there have been numerous local inquiries – all cataloguing the gross failures of officials who showed more concern for communal peace than female safety – still the scandal rarely troubles the broader political conscience. Everyone knows about it, but few dwell on it. In polite society it is the great unmentionable, the atrocity that dare not speak its name. You wring your hands over it, and nothing more. You agree it was bad, and you move on.
It’s not hard to see why a culture of cowardice still clings to this scandal more than any other – it’s because the questions it raises about 21st-century Britain are legion, profound and terrifying. Thousands of girls subjected to vile abuse while officialdom, the police, the left and even many feminists looked the other way because they value communal calm more than working-class life and dignity? No wonder they wish this scandal would go away. No wonder they’re content to acknowledge it but never interrogate it. No wonder they’re more comfortable talking about a Tory MP putting his hand on a middle-class journalist’s knee. They simply lack the psychological and moral resources to reflect on what it says about their rule that thousands of poor and working-class girls were raped right under the nose of their bureacracy.
It isn’t because they think the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal is insignificant that they avoid dwelling on it. On the contrary, it is precisely the mammoth nature of the scandal, the vast and swirling questions it raises, that makes them so allergic to grappling with it. This is without question one of the great outrages of the postwar period. It is the moment the state failed, catastrophically, in its most basic duty: to protect its citizens from harm. It’s the scandal that exposes the sinister self-preserving instincts of the bureaucratic elites, who we now know will do anything to protect their ideology and influence, including turning a blind eye to the rape of destitute girls. They shout ‘racist!’ at anyone who talks about ‘grooming gangs’ because they know our pesky questions threaten to unravel their moral pretensions and shatter their political authority. They know what’s at stake.
For nothing exposes the dangerous aloofness of Britain’s new ruling class as much as the ‘grooming’ scandal does. This scandal speaks to their classism, cowardice and deep distrust of us, the public. Every step of the way in this horror, they were guided by their fear of the masses, their dread of the plebs. From their panic about stirring up ‘Islamophobia’ to their fear of fuelling the ‘far right’, they confirmed, again and again, their view of everyday Brits as a mob-in-waiting, as so bigoted and volatile that we cannot be trusted with the truth about these gangs, or anything else. They failed working-class girls and then demeaned the whole public. They treated poor girls as trash and then trashed the right of everyone else to protest against it. This scandal is far from over. It has only just begun.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
4 comments:
We are fortunate to live in NZ.
We have learnt of the horrific sexual abuse of Gisèle Pelicot and her incredible bravery. Now this article on more horrific sexual abuse. Not to mention the network of the revolting Epstein indulging the rich and famous with slippery truths, fat wallets
and unquestionable entitlement. And the endless stories of "every day" abuse of women and children.
Why is sexual abuse ignored or covered up ? Why is it a dirty little secret? Why are women and sex so inextricably considered as perpetrators of the obscene? Why are the victims so profoundly devalued as human beings? Why are girls and women so loathed? How does the festering of these violent abusive minds and cultures go unnoticed? Why is there no accountability ?
Why is sexual abuse and rape de facto culturally endorsed?
Yes, the political humbug regarding grooming gangs has been reported on for decades; Breaking Views has covered the story too, here:
https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2024/04/barrie-davis-there-will-always-be.html
The British politicians including Jess Phillips, Yvette Cooper and Wes Streeting continue to evade the issue. The lie to their claims of concern is shown by the comparison with how quickly Two-tier Kier quashed the riots by indigenous British following the Southport massacre earlier this year.
My only complaint about what Elon Musk has said is that one has to be a multi-billionaire with connections before anyone will listen. Tommy Robinson has also been reported on, but he had to go to jail first. And still nothing has been done.
The problem is racism. We are having a similar problem in New Zealand with the Treaty and the Waitangi Tribunal. I assume there is a common element and what I want to know is what specifically is driving it.
This issue isn’t going away because it isn’t being dealt with. Eventually the people will take matters into their own hands.
It’s the same with illegal immigration in Britain, no action to stop people entering illegally, yet if you tweet something the internet police don’t like, off to jail you go.
The root cause is cowardice of elected officials to act.
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