Barely a week goes by without there being more stories about #MeToo and Time’s Up in the news. It’s good news, though, that this sexual violence against women is finally being called out so ceaselessly.
But what is appalling, is when you compare this coverage with the intermittent attention given to the scandal of organised child rape, which is endemic across Britain. While it’s certainly to be welcomed that some focus has finally been shone on what is curiously known as ‘grooming’, we rarely hear about these poor victims.
When they do make it to the news, the majority of these British cases – which are far removed from the #MeToo glamour of Hollywood – are reported in a way that sanitises the reality of what happens to these vulnerable teenagers. Not least by the use of the term ‘grooming’. So let’s be clear. We are talking about the sexual abuse, rape, and pimping of children. Young girls are drugged, forced to drink alcohol, tortured and violated in sadistic and violent fashion by man after man. Some become pregnant and are forced to abort; all are routinely beaten by pimps if they “step out of line”.
The continued reluctance to cover the scandal is nothing new. I first began researching this issue in the early 2000s, but it took me almost seven years to persuade an editor to publish the very first investigation into the phenomenon. The cases I had looked at were all based in the north of England, where parents, and in some cases, the victims, had been desperately trying to get police to follow-up their complaints about gangs of men, primarily of Pakistani Muslim heritage, targeting teenage girls.
But editor after editor told me that they were concerned that people would consider it ‘Islamophobic’ if they were to draw attention to the subject. That unease among much of the liberal media to chase these stories for fear of being seen as anti-Muslim remains. As I have long argued, however, these particular gangs of men do not rape and pimp children because they are Pakistani Muslim – they do it because they are pimps and child abusers. Let’s not forget we are perfectly capable of growing our very own white child rapists (remember Jimmy Savile?).
That these men got away with it for so long (just as Savile did), was in part because the police and social services simply did not care enough about the victims. They weren’t looking hard enough for the gangs. And what little desire they had to protect these girls was outweighed by a reluctance to allow white racists to whip up a “race riot” over the fact that the majority of the rapists in these cases were Muslim. That and the fear of being called racist themselves.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe[…] sexually abused and pimped by gangs of men in what became known as the “Rochdale grooming gang scandal”. At GIDS, she saw much of the same behaviour from some of the girls presenting as trans and […]