The recent case of Shabir Ahmed, ringleader of a Rochdale grooming gang, illustrates the problem perfectly. His victims were repeatedly told he would be deported upon being released from prison, only to discover that a decades-old legal provision meant this had never actually been possible, with the Government scrambling to find a work-around. And now, we see the same pattern over early release. Grand announcements are made, that serious child sex offenders will not leave prison early — only for the public to discover that the law excludes offenders whose crimes were committed before 2003.

Surely the lawyers and ministers making these high-profile announcements should know the law before standing in front of the cameras? After all, these are hardly obscure technicalities that emerge from nowhere. They are fundamental legal provisions that should already be understood. Though perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that when Whitehall concocts policy on the hoof, reality is quick to catch up.

All this does more than expose incompetence. It also erodes public confidence in the Government and criminal justice system, with the wider public left wondering whether anyone in power actually knows what they are doing. I certainly wonder it too.

In the end, though, this is about more than politics. For survivors of child sexual exploitation, every announcement raises hope, every reversal destroys it, and every correction creates fear and uncertainty. At the Maggie Oliver Foundation, the charity I set up to support victims of sexual abuse, we meet countless survivors struggling to cope with the constant mixed messages. Every press release, every correction, retraumatizes people who have endured more than any human being should ever have to.

None of this is new. For over a decade, I’ve watched politicians, police forces and public institutions react to events instead of planning for them. I’ve seen point-scoring replace careful thought, and comms take precedence over honest accountability. Governments appear desperate to look decisive and capable, yet too often the detail just isn’t there.

And, through it all, it’s impossible not to reflect on our new prime minister. Today, Andy Burnham speaks passionately about stopping serious sexual offenders from leaving prison early. Few would argue with his words. But where was that determination when, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, he had both the opportunity and responsibility to hold Greater Manchester Police (GMP) to account for catastrophic failures — failures that allowed hundreds of children to be abused?

The context is worth repeating here. For years, GMP dismissed victims, closed inquiries and ignored vital intelligence into the grooming-gang scourge. Between 2003 and 2014, for example, one NHS worker warned police and social services about what was happening 100 times — but was told the witnesses weren’t reliable. And when officers did investigate abuse, they often went for easier convictions with lower sentences. In one case, a rapist got a 13-year-old child pregnant, yet was out of prison in less than three years.

In the aftermath of these horrors, the Operation Augusta Review, focused on South Manchester, as well as a separate Rochdale Review, studied what went wrong. Both were set up by Burnham in his role as Greater Manchester’s Police and Crime Commissioner, while I myself was heavily involved too, and overall found them to be thorough pieces of work. Not that Burnham could have done much about that: using my years of experience as a GMP detective, I had already put most of the evidence in the public domain, not least in my book Survivors. Denying what happened simply wasn’t credible.

The report into the abuse in Oldham, however, was very different, and in my opinion represented a genuine cover-up. But because I hadn’t worked in the town, I was unable to really object. Yet when, in 2025, the fourth and final “Assurance Review” was published — suggesting that lessons had been learned and the system was now working — I was appalled.

The report totally failed to include the voices of a single victim or survivor. That should have rung alarm bells from the outset, and at the time I fought fiercely to persuade Burnham that this just wasn’t right. How, I asked, could you meaningfully assure the public that the system is working better today without listening to the survivors actually experiencing it?

When challenged, Burnham personally told me that His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) — the body meant to oversee the police — had greater powers than the original independent review team. But that misses the point: greater powers cannot replace victims’ voices. More than that, some survivors had engaged with the review process since 2017, trusting it with deeply personal experiences and helping expose what had gone so catastrophically wrong. To then exclude them from the Assurance Review was, in my view, indefensible.

Besides, whatever Burnham’s claims about the HMIC, that still meant expecting one public body to mark another’s homework, even as the very people who could tell them what was happening on the ground were excluded.

Suggested Reading

Why is London ignoring its grooming gangs?

By Julie Bindel

Gary Ridgway and Malcolm Newsam — safeguarding experts who worked on the first three reports for six years — understood this completely, and I fought alongside them to keep victims’ voices at the heart of the process. For well over a year, we tried to achieve that. But ultimately we failed. Gary and Malcolm then took the principled decision to resign rather than putting their names to something they couldn’t support. Their departure was a real loss: two highly experienced professionals who’d earned the trust of victims and were ready to stand by their principles.

Whatever the review claims, I know that issues remain. And this, I think, is where the real hypocrisy lies. Every day at the Maggie Oliver Foundation, we continue to support survivors who face poor and incompetent investigations, inconsistent decision-making, inadequate communication, and institutions that still become defensive and secretive when challenged. Yes, problems have in some respects been tackled. But anyone suggesting they’ve actually been solved is either mendacious or delusional.

Yet if Burnham is clearly part of the issue here, what concerns me even more is that he’s just the latest “face” of a faceless establishment. Governments come and go. Prime ministers change. Cabinet ministers are reshuffled. But the machinery behind them often remains remarkably unchanged. In my opinion, we still have a system dominated by powerful officials, “men and women in gray suits” working behind the scenes, people the public rarely see and who are almost never held accountable when things go wrong. Different politicians front the cameras, but many of the same institutional instincts remain.

Of course, some will say things have changed, because we now have a new prime minister. And, to be sure, the style has changed since the days of Keir Starmer, and the language too. But I am far more interested in outcomes and results — and, in Burnham’s administration, I see too much of the same arrogant culture that characterized previous governments, Conservative and Labour alike.

What is new is that fewer people are willing to accept the status quo. Of course, victims have been telling their stories for decades, even if the media discusses their stories as if they’re totally new. The difference now is that those in power are far more exposed. Social media and investigative journalism make it much harder for institutions to control the narrative. Carefully managed public relations can no longer conceal horrific truths in the way they once did.

But what gives me hope are the survivors themselves. For too long, they were ignored or dismissed, while institutions closed ranks and protected their own. Today, however, victims are increasingly finding their voices, refusing to accept half-truths and vocally demanding accountability without fear.

That is a profound change, and it can only be a good thing. If I have played even a small part in moving this conversation forward over the last 13 years, then I’m immensely proud. Not because it’s been easy — it hasn’t. Not because it’s made me popular — it certainly hasn’t. But simply because every step forward has been driven by survivors who refused to stay silent, who trusted me with their stories, and who have shown extraordinary courage in demanding the justice they should have received years ago. And no one, let alone Andy Burnham, can take that away from them.

***

“I was the victim of a grooming gang and now I’m a survivor. I endured hell and everyone did fuck all.” Ellie Reynolds* was gang-raped and abused as a young teenager in the 2000s, in her hometown of Barrow-in-Furness. Only now are we in Preston Crown Court to hear the sentencing of her abusers.

The grooming gang story is often framed as something that happened far away, in the North, in the bad old Nineties and 2000s. But this is a story about what is happening right now.

Ellie’s abuse began in 1996 and carried on for another four years. And as we know now, this wasn’t an isolated incident. The systematic abuse of literally thousands of children was taking place in Rotherham, Bradford, Derbyshire, Huddersfield, Oxford, Rochdale, and Bristol, among others. We only know about this because of brave victims, dogged whistleblowers and the resulting prosecutions. But while many resilient women have come forward, so many others remained silent — ashamed, disbelieved, ignored.

In January, Elon Musk targeted our country’s failings when he posted on X that: “[Keir] Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for six years (2008-2013)”, demanding that he “face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain”. It was in response to Jess Phillips’ remarkable decision, as minister for the safeguarding of women, to reject a national public inquiry into the grooming of children in Oldham.

Whatever his motivation, Musk was right in his analysis. This is a scandal that has been swept under the carpet for years. I’ve been following grooming cases for almost my whole career. Over the decades, a succession of inquiries and reports has indicated the nature and scale of the catastrophe, yet nothing has been done to address the underlying problem, let alone fix it.

In 2014, we had the Jay Report and Operation Bullfinch. There have been independent reviews into the failings of Greater Manchester, Bristol and Derby, among other cities. And it has been three years since the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which concluded that the current system is fundamentally flawed and incapable of protecting vulnerable children.

Yet despite the money, effort and desperate testimonials poured into each of these investigations, little has changed. The Conservative government was tasked with implementing the 20 recommendations of the final IICSA report. It did nothing, save passing the burden of responsibility on to Labour after last July’s election.

At the start of this year, it looked like something might be done. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a £10 million plan for a series of local inquiries into grooming gangs, as well as a rapid review of the current scale of exploitation across the UK. To lead the review, Cooper appointed Tom Crowther KC, who chaired the inquiry into child sex abuse in Telford. Published in 2022, Crowther found that more than 1,000 girls had been abused in the Shropshire town over a period of 30 years, amid “shocking” failures by the police and local council. Hopes rose that, finally, the Government was taking the problem seriously.

And yet, barely three months in, the wheels are already coming off. Crowther has expressed frustration with the little progress that has been made: the Government isn’t collaborating, the process is being watered down, and the political will simply isn’t there. That matters, and not just historically. Without asking why justice has come so slowly, and without attempting to understand why the grooming happened — and still happens — nothing will change. Communities will continue to be demonized, gangs will continue to operate with impunity, and a steady stream of offenders will continue to be released back into the community, many back into the very areas where their victims still live.

***

Almost 30 years ago, in 1996, I visited a tiny charity in the center of Leeds. There I met Angela*, a hard-working single mother, who described how she had discovered her daughter Jane*, 14, was being picked up in taxis by Asian men, who then used her for sex.

Her mother was desperate, on the edge of tears. “She stays out late and she’s been seen with older lads in the town center,” Angela told me. “I’ve given [the] police a load of car number plates and names but they say she’s choosing this lifestyle and there’s nothing they can do.”

Angela and her daughter lived in Keighley, a market town in West Yorkshire small enough for everyone to know your business, and a place infamous as the so-called ground zero of the grooming gangs. It was here, back in 2002, that Ann Cryer, the town’s then Labour MP, first exposed how groups of predominantly Pakistani men were preying on predominantly white girls. And it was in Keighley, a year later, that the first grooming gang conviction was secured.

I had long been aware of organized gangs targeting vulnerable girls. But it was only through meeting mothers of victims that I realized how little the authorities cared about these girls.

Even in those early days, the pattern was clear. The victims were generally vulnerable children from impoverished towns with high unemployment and racial disharmony — and society tended to see them as worthless. Even the police described them as “troublesome” and “slags”. Their families, if they had any, were seen as disreputable. All the while, social workers talked blithely about “personal choice” and “consent”.

There was another factor too: race. Throughout the 2000s, I was one of a handful of civilians invited to attend the annual Police Vice Conference, where experts in child sexual abuse and exploitation shared intelligence. It was at the 2004 conference that I heard, from one of the most senior police officers in attendance, that fears of “race riots” were growing — as more and more information came in about the predominance of Pakistani Muslims in child abuse and pimping gangs across the north of England.

This added another complication to the toxic mix: politics. In the absence of mainstream political support, other political agents would run to “rescue” — or weaponize — victims. This was certainly the case when Charlene Downes went missing from her Blackpool home in November 2003. Blackpool has always been a hotspot for child abuse, and a growing immigrant community back then was the source of much local suspicion.

Early on in their investigation, police became aware that Charlene, then 14, had along with various other girls been targeted by abusers active in the town, swapping sex for food, cigarettes and affection. It was a modus operandi that was becoming familiar to those who were following the escalation of these cases. “I found out,” her mother told me back then, “that Charlene was getting chips for a blow job. How can those bastards do that to kids?”

During the hunt for Charlene, police uncovered Blackpool’s open secret: Muslim men, from Southeast Asia and the Middle East, had latched on to the opportunities afforded them by the nighttime economy. Taxi drivers and takeaway workers would prey on girls, passing them around to each other, inviting friends and business associates to come to the back rooms of kebab shops, and the offices of mini cab firms, to have sex with them. This was organized, a business, run for money, with the perk of on-tap sex with terrified victims.

While it was by no means certain that Charlene was being solely abused by immigrants, far-Right political parties saw an opportunity. The BNP, with the support of Charlene’s family, latched onto her case as an example of the problem caused by Pakistani Muslim men “invading” Britain. Once they got hold of her, the narrative was set.

The pernicious effect of the BNP could be seen months after Charlene’s disappearance. In 2004, Edge of the City, a documentary about gang grooming in Bradford, was due to be released. Abuse cases had been surfacing at an alarming rate, and the filmmaker Anna Hall was the first to expose the pattern we now know as gang grooming. But the BNP gleefully leapt on the film, describing it as “a party political broadcast” for its local election campaign. West Yorkshire Police, fearing a racist backlash, advised Channel 4 to withdraw the film from transmission at the last minute. Community cohesion took precedence over the rape of kids.

It’s something we’re still seeing. Since most of the worst cases we know about involve gangs of Asian, Muslim men pimping out white women, a reluctance to act is supercharged by fears of being accused of racism. In the past, authorities would rather have turned a blind eye. Today, despite everything we know, the same thing is happening. Only last week, Sir Trevor Phillips claimed that the Home Secretary was failing to push ahead with local reviews “because of the demographic of people involved… largely Pakistani Muslim background, and also in Labour-held seats and councils who would be offended by it”.

Meanwhile, back in the early 2000s, Charlene remained missing. I kept an eye on her story, wondering if she’d ever turn up. By 2006, when the evidence of her being horrifically abused by multiple men had been exposed, I pitched the story to my then editor at The Guardian, Katherine Viner. She acted much as the authorities did. She called me and said: “We would be called racist if we publish this.” So I wrote about grooming gangs for The Sunday Times magazine instead. The day after it was published, I was added to the Islamophobia Watch website. By 2008, Viner had read the room and published a piece by me about the Downes case.

All the while, the politicization of the grooming gangs continues. Over the years, EDL poster boy Tommy Robinson has used the issue to further his own political agenda against “radical Islam”. Neither an expert in abuse, nor a particular champion of children or women, he has if anything made things worse for victims. In 2019, Robinson was imprisoned for contempt of court after breaching reporting restrictions on one rape trial and jeopardizing due process. Notwithstanding his motivation, he has been trumpeted as a hero by Musk and many others for his propagandizing of the issue. In the justice vacuum, bad actors spy an opportunity.

In the end, Charlene’s body was never found. The hunt for her has been one of Lancashire Police’s longest-running missing person inquiries. But, many years after her disappearance, rumors began circulating around Blackpool that her body had been chopped up and used as kebab meat, sold from the very takeaways where she and other girls were abused.

***

Court 1 at Preston Crown Court is the biggest in the building: the press bench is full, and the public gallery is packed with survivors and supporters, including Ellie Reynolds and myself. It is January 2025, and we are here to see the sentencing of three monstrous brothers who raped, sold, abused and tortured a succession of vulnerable young girls between 1996 and 2010. It has been 30 years since these men started committing their crimes.

Amran Miah, 49, Alman Miah, 47, and Shah Joman Miah (known as “Sarj”), 38, were violent predators who targeted girls in abusive family homes or care and foster placements. Some of their victims were as young as seven. The girls were lured in by promises of romance, rides in fast cars, vodka, cigarettes, cannabis and the freedom to hang out at the men’s apartments: they leapt at what they thought was a chance to escape. A life where someone cared. The promises couldn’t have been further from the truth, as they were prostituted from cars, on streets and in apartments across Britain. Often locked in rooms with nothing but a filthy mattress, they were forced into violent sexual acts, sometimes with several men at once.

Refusal to comply would mean being beaten with dog chains, forced to drink their own urine and tortured. One of the Miah victims showed me cigarette burns on her legs, stomach and arms. “[The pimp] used me as an ashtray,” she tells me, “and a few times when I was asleep he’d piss all over me, not bothering to go to the toilet, then make me get up and wash the sheets while he went back to sleep.”

Another girl, who was not in court but followed the proceedings by video link, was abused over a period of five years, from the age of seven. “He ejaculated into her mouth,” the judge tells the court. “She said that when [he] ejaculated she began to cry and make a noise and [he] replied, ‘Stop it or we’ll get found out’.” She was raped, filmed and photographed.

Elizabeth*, another girl, is in court that day too. During the lunch break, she tells me that she knew of at least one of the victims in the trial considering withdrawing their evidence because they were convinced they wouldn’t be believed. Elizabeth was a witness to the grooming gang activities, including seeing girls being taken to the room above a takeaway to be raped, some still in their school uniforms. She was a key witness for the prosecution, but after she reported what she had seen, word soon got around. “They smashed my windows,” she says of the threats she received. “I feel scared despite the police promising I am protected.”

In court, defense barristers make valiant attempts to introduce mitigation: one defendant suffered with depression, another has an autistic child, and each of the brothers has a work ethic and is “loyal” to the others. But the judge reminds the court of their depravity: “You threatened to tell [a witness] that if she said anything to the police you would set her house on fire. She spoke of attending hospital due to anxiety. I am satisfied that each of you acted in a predatory and paedophilic manner… You saw your victims as vehicles to be used and abused at your will and when you wanted to. You treated them with utter contempt.” The robust sentencing reflected the seriousness of the crimes: all three men were sentenced to at least a decade in prison. Facing the stiffest sentence, Shah Joman Miah was sent down for a minimum of 21 years and 232 days.

These children were treated as disposable rubbish by the men who raped and pimped them. But a similarly appalling punishment was meted out by the authorities tasked with protecting them.

***

For years, Sara Rowbotham was a sexual health worker in Rochdale. As the coordinator of the Crisis Intervention Team, a body linked to the NHS, from 2003 to 2014, it was her job to identify young people who were vulnerable to child sex exploitation.

Rowbotham repeatedly tried to alert police and social services, from as early as 2004, to the fact that girls were being systematically abused by gangs of older Asian men. She made over 100 referrals, none of which was actioned. During her time as a sexual health worker, she made something she called the “Boyfriend Book” — in which she kept records of all of the perpetrators, and their details as given by their victims. The book was eventually used in court as evidence. It is still being used today, at the ongoing trials at which she is called as a witness, some 20 years after the abuse first happened.

Rowbotham went on to provide key evidence that ended in the conviction of nine men in 2012, and 10 more in a separate investigation in 2015. “It was my job to keep those girls safe,” she tells me. “I tried to do that, I kept referring cases to police, to social workers, and they did nothing. They ignored me. They turned against me and shut me out.”

This reluctance among authorities to believe the young victims is borne out by research by Sarah Hall, who has been involved in child protection for 20 years. The social workers understood sexually exploited girls as being able to make choices, supposedly unlike girls abused in the home. Hall says she often heard the phrasing “putting themselves in risky situations”.

Because these girls were widely viewed as “sluts”, they were often ignored. “They were all Pakistani, except one who was Algerian,” Fiona tells me, recounting her abuse at the hands of a gang in 2008, back when she was just 13. “But the police denied they existed.” Fiona was in care, and staff knew from very early on what was happening. “They would have multiagency meetings but no one would turn up. They said, ‘Well she goes missing all the time so she must enjoy it’.”

Vulnerable, confused and angry, Fiona could only lash out. “Because I wasn’t getting listened to and my mental health was deteriorating quickly, I ended up getting done for assault on the staff and criminal damage on the care home… So my criminal record is all to do with criminal damage and assault of care home staff and police officers.” Think of it: this girl asked for help to escape her rapists, and ended up with a criminal record herself.

Damningly, the serious case review conducted by the local authority, when it happened, found 18 instances of sexual assault or rape that the care home had failed to report to the police. Fiona has been fighting for “justice and accountability” for the past decade. Amber* was similarly criminalized. Barely 14 when she was first targeted in 2007, she was already on the child protection register in Rochdale. The men lured her in, groomed her and then subjected her to repeated and violent sexual abuse.

That nightmare should have ended with the arrest and trial of the perpetrators. But instead, the police, CPS and even social services treated Amber as a criminal. In 2009, when she was 16, uniformed officers came to her mother’s house, arrested her and took her to the police station.

Because, like all the other girls, Amber had been told she had to bring her friends along to meet some of the gang members, she was portrayed as an assistant pimp. When nine of the men were eventually put on trial for crimes relating to Amber and other girls, she was part of the case — but not as a victim. The prosecutors had put her name on the indictment as one of the offenders.

Though she was neither tried nor convicted, the media described her in court as a “honey monster”. Nor did her ordeal end when the men were sent down. Social services pursued her with a view to removing both her very young child and her unborn second baby. The case dragged on for 18 months before the judge dismissed it. Five years passed before an apology and compensation came from social services. “It’s absolutely outrageous that none of them have still been charged for me, none of them have even been prosecuted,” Amber tells me. “I still can’t get my head around that after all these years.”

Two decades on, Sarah Hall insists little has changed. “There’s still lots of victim blaming,” she tells me, “blaming of parents, stereotyping, and young people are deemed to be making a choice and the systems back that up. Depending on where and by whom you are raped and sexually assaulted in this country as a kid, you will either be safe-guarded or you won’t be.”

***

It is raining in Manchester when I arrive at the Crown Court, where eight Asian men from Rochdale stand accused of treating two girls as “sex slaves”. They are charged with 56 sexual offenses, include grooming, sexually exploiting and raping two 13-year olds between 2001 and 2006. It is February 2025.

There are police outside, sent from Rochdale to make sure “there are no security issues, due to the sensitivity of the case”. But the case is 25 years old, I say. “It is old,” replies one of the officers, “but unfortunately it’s still happening today.”

There are eight men in the dock, all Pakistani Muslim, ranging in age from 39 to 66. They are accused of rape and other sexual offenses against two girls between 2001 and 2006. Girl A and Girl B, both abused from the age of 13, were in court, surrounded by family and friends. The women are in their 30s now, but wear the look of deep trauma. Giving evidence, Girl A said that she had been abused by at least 100 men, but when she then mentioned the figure of 200, she was challenged by one of the defense barristers, implying she was lying. “There could’ve been more to be fair,” she replied. “There [were] that many it was hard to keep count.”

The abuse began when the girls, in local authority care, started hanging around the market, where Mohammed Zahid, one of the men on trial, had a lingerie stall. Both girls were casual workers on the stall, paid in clothes, cigarettes and alcohol. They were also expected to have degradingly sadistic sex with Zahid (known as “Boss” or the “Knickerman”) and his associates.

Though Girl A told local children’s services about “hanging around” with older men in 2004  — as well as drinking and using drugs, and having sex with men introduced to her by “Boss” — neither her school nor social services made any reports to the police. Instead, one of the girls was labeled a “prostitute” at the age of 10. Rowbotham was ignored when she reported it to police and social services. As she puts it: “I can only imagine how many other girls they went on to harm.”

Rowbotham tells me about one of the mothers of Girl A, back in 2005, before police were even acknowledging there was a problem. “Girl A’s mum was out of her mind trying to get the cops to do something — she phoned them constantly and I encouraged her to keep doing it even if they didn’t respond,” she says. “And she was not the only one desperate to get them to act.”

This particular case only came to trial after one of the girls tracked an abuser down on Facebook and spotted a second “selling fruit and veg out of a van near a school”. So many of these men are still prowling the streets. There are dozens known to have been active gang members who have never been arrested, or spent a day in prison. And those hundreds of men who paid to rape the girls remain invisible.

***

The number of abused girls we know about is easily in the tens of thousands. This dwarfs the number of convictions. Between 2005 and 2017, only 264 men were found guilty. Every historic review includes evidence that social services teams and police officers were reluctant to pursue groups of Asian men for fear of being accused of racism. It also seems likely that police feared civil unrest among the white population, not least given the rise of the BNP and the race-baiting of Tommy Robinson. Once again, these fears are surely relevant today too, especially given the disorder last summer.

Yet whatever the grim political logic, this attitude is hard to justify, especially when you consider the words of perpetrators themselves. One example is Shabir Ahmed, the leader of one of the Rochdale grooming gangs, who was convicted in 2013. During his trial, Ahmed made his feelings clear. “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 [more] advanced in sex.”

As that statement implies, race is yet again a factor here, something also clear from the statistics. Of the few hundred men convicted between 2005-17, 84% of them were Asian. In the Rochdale abuse scandal of 2012, the men involved were primarily British Pakistani men. In Telford, according to the independent 2022 inquiry there, the abusers were also men of “southern Asian heritage”.

While white men are certainly involved in child exploitation, then, the continued predominance of South Asian men in grooming gangs is undeniable. Data released in January 2025 has found that Pakistanis are up to four times more likely to be involved than the general population. And figures from all 43 forces in England and Wales show that 13.7% of child sexual exploitation in the first nine months of 2024 involved Pakistani men, a rise from under 7% in 2023.

But it’s a mistake to think that these rapists restrict themselves to white victims. Zlakha Ahmed, a survivor of gang abuse in Telford, is testament to this. Now 62, her abuse happened when she was just seven. “It was two men who were close family members,” she tells me. “I was taken to a park one day and I was raped by a gang of men.”

Farida*, for her part, was the victim of a gang of largely Pakistani men operating in Oxfordshire, 21 of whom have since been convicted. Between 2010 and 2020, 18 victims gave evidence in six trials about abuse spanning from the late Nineties to the late 2000s.

Zlakha Ahmed told the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA): “It feels as though BME women and girls are shrugged off by statutory services, which are staffed by predominantly white individuals. When it comes to Asian children in particular, a lot of white workers bury their heads in the sand and then we are blamed as a community for not coming forward.”

It was the same for Farida. When she reported being raped and kidnapped by grooming gang members to police in Oxford, they did not believe her. “Because I am Asian and with a Pakistani name,” she says, “I didn’t fit the stereotype for this officer.”

The stark reality, then, is that police and prosecutors have a dismal record when it comes to dealing with the sexual abuse of girls, whatever the class or ethnicities of the victims and perpetrators. Data from the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse shows that during 2023-4, only 12% of reports were subject to any criminal justice intervention, and around two thirds of investigations were closed because of “evidential difficulties”.

***

Kevin Hyland is a former Metropolitan Police Officer, the UK’s first Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, and an expert in human trafficking and sexual exploitation. He understands organized gang abuse and how to get the best results during investigations. More than that, he is keen to explore how law enforcement can stop gangs getting access to girls in the first place.

“If entire groups believe they can operate with impunity and start to target young girls but then feel the weight against them, it will deter some from offending,” he says. “That weight should be societal, it should be legal, it should be from their own backgrounds and culture.”

Maggie Oliver makes a similar point. Credited with exposing the Rochdale grooming gang scandal, in 2012 she left Greater Manchester Police in protest at its handling of the town’s grooming trial. She tells me that gangs are still active in Manchester, Telford, Rochdale, Rotherham, Blackpool and Leeds. More to the point, Oliver insists that the grooming gang phenomenon is linked to a belief system of people who don’t share the same values as the British public generally — “that this will just continue to explode unless we get a grip of it as the root cause of this sort of abuse”.

For Hyland, though, pushing the line that any type of crime is committed exclusively or even predominantly by one particular group allows those outside the demographic to hide in plain sight, and for law enforcers and social workers to fail to follow leads. As he says: “One of the big challenges we’ve got is that policing has become so complex, so politically correct, so influenced by outside measures, that the focus on the bigger picture is compromised.”

Not that there seems much appetite to address the problem. Amber, the victim from Rochdale, tells me that men arrested in Rochdale are “still there, still delivering takeaways, still driving taxis”. She’s even given some names to police “but [they] don’t go and arrest them. I think it’s too much effort for them.”

All the while, how grooming happens is changing. Smartphones and the internet now mean that men no longer have to sit and wait outside a victim’s home. Instead, they can make initial contact through an online platform, which means less risk of being caught.

As Oliver explains, men will increasingly befriend girls online, pretending to be a younger boy, before coercing the child into sending explicit photographs — which will then be used as blackmail. The targets, anyway, are the same: vulnerable girls who feel as though they’re being treated like grown-ups, even as they’re forced to engage in terrible sexual activity.

Oliver is well aware, through work at her eponymous foundation, that state complacency means grooming gangs are as entrenched as ever. No wonder, then, that this week she’s launching #TheyKnew, a new campaign aiming to bring legal action against officials who failed to act in the face of terrible abuse. Alongside Oliver are two survivors of grooming gang abuse, Elizabeth* and Samantha, both of whom I’ve met, a heartening reminder that some victims are managing to turn around their lives.

Unfortunately, good news is hard to come by, with Robbie Moore, the current Conservative MP for Keighley, worrying that the problem is actually worsening. “[W]hat we’ve unfortunately got here in Bradford is the local authority not willing to trigger that process of having an inquiry,” he says. “But Bradford, from the evidence I have seen, has a far bigger problem even than the likes of Rochdale.”

I know from bitter experience that where crime flourishes, so too does exploitation of women and girls. And child sexual exploitation has followed the growth of county drug lines. One policeman I know in southeast England says he constantly hears how the gangs are now dominated by pimps running girls. “I have taken statements from half a dozen girls, from age 14 to 18, in the past six months who want to bring charges against men who are, effectively, grooming gang leaders. The perpetrators are usually from immigrant groupings, and operate taxis and takeouts, but they also supply some of the drugs to the runners, and keep the girls for themselves to share around and sell to business associates.”

Resources aren’t usually made available to deal with the sexual exploitation element of these crimes, with officers encouraged to focus on drugs and weapons. One senior officer very recently told me that the victims are part of the problem and know exactly what they are doing — it’s the same old harmful narrative being trotted out again.

One recommendation from the 2022 IICSA report is that data should be collected on exploitation networks. Shockingly, it’s yet to happen. Another suggestion is the mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse at school or the GP. Both of these recommendations, if properly implemented, would make a difference. But to date, nothing has happened.

While all the victims would welcome further scrutiny of the scandal, meanwhile, most of all they want to see broad improvements to the criminal justice system. What’s in no doubt is that it’s currently unfit for purpose: neither detecting perpetrators nor keeping victims safe.

Meanwhile, our politicians seem determined to keep looking the other way. Though Cooper announced those new local inquiries at the start of the year, Jess Phillips — allegedly the minister responsible for safeguarding women and girls — is already backtracking. At the start of April, she said there would be a more “flexible approach to support both full independent local inquiries and more bespoke work, including local victims’ panels or locally led audits of the handling of historical cases”. Translation: the £5 million set aside for the inquiries was no longer being allocated. It also meant that politicians, rather than independent agents like Tom Crowther, would drive the investigations.

This announcement was met by horror from many. That includes Trevor Phillips, who described the response as “shameful” because, he said, it was so obviously politically motivated. Robbie Moore, for his part, is “completely infuriated” by the Government’s update, arguing it’s an admission that pretty much no progress has been made. Let’s not forget: these inquiries were supposed to have been launched by Easter. Trevor Philips is right. It’s shameful that Jess Phillips, a self-styled advocate for abused women and girls, appears to have suddenly lost enthusiasm for dealing with one of the biggest child sexual abuse scandals in modern British history — likely for fear of being branded a racist. What hope is there for girls being abused right now, if our politicians still refuse to even admit the problem exists?

***

John’s* daughter Evie* was 14 when she was targeted by a gang of taxi drivers. He is now helping support another 14-year-old girl who remains under the control of some of the same men. Evie reported her abusers to the police, after eight months of rape, sexual assault and degradation. “She was made to strip naked and then dance for the abusers,” John tells me. “And she says money changed hands. They would have sex with her. She was just a kid.”

Sophie*, another girl, one day turned up on John’s doorstep in the northwest of England, having heard that one of Evie’s abusers had been convicted of rape, and realizing that the same gang was targeting her.

“I have told the police, repeatedly, that this gang is in operation right now, that that some of the same men that raped my daughter are now doing it to others,” John tells me. But despite going to the police in December last year, he says nothing has happened so far.

Sophie, for her part, is desperate, and has asked for help from the local domestic violence service to offer support along with a safety plan. But she is “shit scared to leave, and to report them,” John says, “because if the police don’t lift them, but they find out she’s dobbed them in, she’s dead.”

Twenty three years after Ann Cryer first spoke out about the widespread gang-related abuse of children in her constituency, little has changed — except that countless more girls have had their lives destroyed.

***

*Names have been changed.

Those words come from George Orwell, who was writing during World War Two about the difficulty of truth-telling. In today’s era of disappointing political leaders, it is easy to forget that it is nothing new for uncomfortable truths, as Orwell put it, to be silenced in the interest of the supposed greater good.

In modern British history, there have been few truths more uncomfortable than that of the grooming gangs. Last week, the organization Open Justice UK released a long fought-for selection of court transcripts. They include sentencing decisions that are both utterly horrific in their graphic detail of sexual abuse, and utterly despair-inducing as to our legal system. The judges presiding over these cases appeared, on multiple occasions, to give offenders much more lenient sentencing than they could have and should have.

Yet the crimes mentioned in the judges’ sentencing remarks are depraved enough to shake anyone’s faith in our species. They are so beyond the pale of normal morality that they make a mockery of the political and social priorities that have taken hold in Britain. Today we live in a censorious culture that has spent more than a decade obsessing over “problematic” issues of media representation; the ever-unrealized dangers of “incels”; and the necessity, or otherwise, of cancellation and social ostracism over “violent” language.

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This set of social rules and norms has become the established table manners of media and political life, but it lacks the capacity to respond to a world that contains systematic child grooming. But if the country ignores the transcripts, there will be no prospect of Britain learning the lessons of these awful crimes. Labour’s shaky record on the subject doesn’t inspire confidence.

So far, the Government has given the impression of acute squeamishness on the issue of grooming gangs. This reaction is disappointing but not unpredictable. After months of pressure, No. 10 opened an inquiry into the grooming gangs, even as it worried that that very inquiry would “play into the hands of” the worst of Britain’s racist forces, cheered on by Elon Musk.

But the truth is that important facts have been kept from public view. As Louise Casey’s report into grooming gangs demonstrated in June, two thirds of cases of group-based child exploitation have been processed without ethnicity being recorded. Casey also noted instances where the ethnicity of the offender had been Tippexed out of case files. There’s no telling what crucial evidence might no longer exist. Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Conservative MP Robbie Moore discovered that the Government is yet to legally instruct councils to protect key records. Even now, council office shredding machines might be destroying any chance of real justice.

In a politically schismatic world, Labour must keep its nerve if it is to deliver any kind of justice for the vulnerable working-class women who were systematically exploited. These are women whose lives were ruined as the state looked away.

I have been a member of Labour for two decades, and my faith that the party is up to the job has been rattled. Talking to other members about the grooming gangs has too often produced a patellar reflex-like invocation of the far-Right. And this is a tendency that goes right to the top. In the spring, the then-Leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell, appeared on Radio 4’s Any Questions?, where she was asked by Reform’s Tim Montgomerie whether she had watched a Channel 4 documentary on the gangs. She replied: “Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Yeah, OK, let’s get that dog whistle out.”

Powell later explained, by way of apology, that she had meant to object to political point-scoring over the issue. Whether her account was true or not, her “dog whistle” accusation had already indicted our political culture. Labour’s leaders, and indeed the party members beneath them, have been confronted by the evil of organized rape and abuse of children, but they cannot see it as being independent of its political convenience or inconvenience to team Left or team Right. The reality, though, is that to blame this catastrophic failure of the state on a single political party cheapens the discussion: a discussion that deserves dignity.

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Kemi Badenoch was seemingly bounced into caring about the cause by her Conservative leadership rival in early 2025. Since then, she has shown a remarkably opportunistic confidence to instrumentalize the issue to make political hay. Yesterday, she spoke of the need for the inquiry to leave “no stone unturned”, notwithstanding her own party leaving plenty of stones unturned when in power. Badenoch is a politician who has spent most of her career on the safer ground of complaining about liberal identity politics. Now she has suddenly found themselves in the company of something truly dark. Her first thought: “This will hurt Labour.”

If Labour’s enemies have shown political cynicism, that does not excuse No. 10’s reticence in opening the inquiry. Nor does it excuse the general impression they give of trepidation in tackling this issue, something Baroness Falkner, the outgoing head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, called out this week.

Despite her “little trumpet” jibe, Lucy Powell was subsequently elected Labour’s deputy leader. Her gaffe was never mentioned on the campaign trail. Evidently, it didn’t bother Labour members enough for them to look for a different candidate.

In September, too, we were reminded of the party’s frayed relationship with the working class communities it was originally founded to represent. A leaked text message referring to gang victims as “poor white trash from Rotherham” forced the resignation of Peterborough’s council leader. Prior to this, Labour attempted to choose one of Rotherham’s councillors to be a candidate for parliament in 2024, before thinking better of it.

Sadiq Khan, likewise, has failed to distinguish himself. In January of this year, Susan Hall, the leader of City Hall’s Conservative contingent, pressed the Mayor on the subject. In a bizarre exchange, full of implied political point-scoring, Khan put on a virtuoso display of pettifogging, asking repeatedly what was meant by a “grooming gang”. He implied that the character of exploitation in London held a complexity that only few could understand.

In reality, the Metropolitan police re-assessed nearly 10,000 cases, of which an expected 3,000 thousand will require further investigation. An undisclosed number will relate to family and institutional abuse: i.e. they did not involve a gang of men preying on young women. Despite his obfuscation, Khan was right in one sense: as The Times reported in October, the grooming gangs inquiry does not yet have an internal definition of what a grooming gang actually is.

For this, and other reasons, the inquiry’s key contributors are also leaving in despair. Four survivors have resigned from its victim liaison panel and two intended chairs have stepped away, with the search for a viable chair now expected to take “months”. Accusations have been made that the scope of the inquiry is being massaged and widened, no doubt because of who it may “play into the hands of” should its focus remain as originally intended. It’s easy to imagine how the lack of a definition of a “grooming gang” might be a means of using constructive ambiguity to reduce clarity.

Would things be different if the victims were different? It is hard to ignore the feeling that, had they not been poor, the sexually exploited women and girls would never have been ignored, mishandled or denied justice for so long. The majority of Labour’s membership consists of well-educated and often well-paid members of the middle class. They must realize that, in the eyes of working-class voters, the legitimacy of the law and the state is now in question. As those working-class voters might ask: does the law give us fair treatment, too?

Anyone reading Open Justice UK’s publication — something that should be forced, A Clockwork Orange-style, on all those who see the inquiry as “Right-wing” — would be led to think the answer is a clear no. In a particularly horrific sentencing transcript, a judge decides to charge an abuser for having groomed a 13-year-old. Her abuse had actually occurred between the ages of 12 and 14, but the judge openly uses the logic that to “average” the age of the victim to 13, rather than to zero in on her abuse as a 12-year-old, would enable the court to avoid the severest possible sentence. In another transcript, a sex trafficker was told that his record of good character was a mitigating factor in sentencing — as though showing a good face to one’s community in the daytime somehow lightens the evil of what he had done in the night.

For generations, the labour movement battled for laws that working class people could trust. Now the working class is represented by a Labour Party that is seriously talking about the abolition of trial by jury. Labour’s political opponents, meanwhile, are keen to present grooming gangs as the crowning sin of multiculturalism. They won’t be making their argument with Queensberry Rules in mind, or with an emphasis on protecting the dignity of victims of this scandal. Labour must remember that this is, at heart, a gigantic state failure to protect the very people the party was founded to represent.

And if the Government makes a mess of this inquiry, why should those people continue to trust in the rule of law? Should Labour continue to silence uncomfortable truths, Britain might have to add our legal system to the list of things and people these gangs have destroyed.

Brown’s insight is a potent one: the real moral hazard behind ultra-high-end luxuries such as private plane travel is the way they stand for exclusive access. An invitation to travel by private plane symbolizes inclusion in what C.S. Lewis called “the Inner Ring”: the aspirational set, the ones in the know, the insider group within which everyone longs to be included. And among the infinite poisons leaking from the Epstein scandal into every level of public life, one of the most noxious is the moral inversion at its heart.

Private-jet luxury is, ultimately, about an Inner Ring of comfort and snobbery; the Epstein story, though, presented a far headier temptation. The private jet filled with extremely young girls, known as the “Lolita Express”, represented corruption in the fullest sense. For this Inner Ring, the initiatory ritual required at least tacit assent to if not active participation in the sexual abuse of very young girls. The defilement of youth and innocence was the point.

And this moral inversion cuts to the heart of the modern world. For Epstein’s network simply took the training-wheels off a moral outlook that has come, by degrees, to govern the entire modern West: one that does not simply reject but actively seeks to desecrate the older, Christian value-system, in pursuit of a morality of power, violence, and individual desire.

One of the earliest and frankest exponents of this moral inversion was also, and not by coincidence, also a trailblazer in the literature of ritual sexual abuse: the Marquis de Sade. Justine (1791), written during one of his numerous stints in prison for sexual crimes, details the suffering and eventual death of Thérèse, a homeless 12-year-old orphan girl, who keeps trying to be virtuous but receiving only violence, cruelty, and sexual torture at the hands of everyone she turns to for help. The message, exhaustively hammered home by de Sade’s characters through lengthy interspersed passages of philosophical debate, is that the world is fundamentally godless and amoral, and there exists no governing force save power, violence, and untrammeled individual desire.

It is, in the precise sense, a satanic worldview. Justine was banned by Napoleon, and did not appear in English translation until the 20th century. But especially since the Sixties, de Sade’s radical libertinism and rejection of all moral constraints has come, by degrees, to appear almost ordinary. So much so that, in recent decades, it’s begun to look as though at least some segments of contemporary society view Justine less as a provocation than as an instruction manual.

I doubt the perpetrators in Britain’s euphemistically named “grooming gangs” have read the Marquis de Sade. But his pitiless libertarianism has, by now, seeped into the Western groundwater, not least via the entrancing image-making vector of the global porn industry. In some respects, of course, especially the widely acknowledged ethnopolitical dynamic to the crimes in some areas, these gangs are bound up in specifically British pathologies. But I also suspect that if my benighted country ever manages a full reckoning of these atrocities, we will find many parallels with the Epstein network — not least in the victim profile, and also, perhaps, the function of the abuse itself.

Just as in Justine, at the heart of these crimes is the pitiless exploitation of vulnerable girls desperate for love and protection. Girls in care, or with cruel or chaotic homes, absent or abusive fathers. Girls who had already experienced been molested. As Julie Bindel shows in a recent investigation of London’s rape gangs, the most salient feature of victims is often less their ethnicity than their lack of trusted, loving adult care.

The same went, too, for Viriginia Giuffre. In Nobody’s Girl, she describes a childhood scarred by abuse at the hands of everyone who should have cared for her. She alleges that her father sexually molested her from the age of 7 to 11, including trading her to a family friend. As a result of this, her behavior worsened so much she was sent to a deeply abusive “treatment center” where she was once forced to eat her own vomit.

It is, like Justine, a miserable litany of abuse: after escaping this setting she lived a semi-itinerant life, punctuated by routine rape at the hands of strangers and acquaintances – before, eventually, she was returned to her father. He then found her employment at his workplace, Trump’s Mar-A-Lago club in Florida, as a towel attendant — only for her to be spotted and groomed there, by Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. “For 10 years,” she writes, “men had cloaked their abuse of me in a fake mantle of ‘love’. Epstein and Maxwell knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein.”

Some are already seeking to discredit her story; there are defamation lawsuits, and Prince Andrew, with whom she claims to have had sex three times, called her a “fantasist”. Who is right? Speaking of the efforts by some literary critics to downplay the Marquis de Sade’s colorful personal life, the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin remarked in Pornography that whether or not you think he did anything wrong is really a question of whether whether or not you are generally inclined to believe de Sade or the women who accused him of sexual abuse.

Radical feminists might also note out that the unhappy story Giuffre maps — the pattern of abuse, neglect, and desperate longing for refuge with trusted parent-figures — is one that reappears with grim regularity among rape gang survivors. Giuffre recounts how Ghislaine Maxwell seemed a warm mother figure to her — but also, from the very first “interview” aged just 16, forced her into sex with Epstein, and later his and Maxwell’s wealthy friends, while herself sometimes joining in.

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There is an unnerving parallel in Justine, in the passage where Thérèse is rescued, or so she thinks, from prison by Mme Dubois, a murderer — only to find Dubois coercing her to join the gang by offering to protect her, before shrugging or even joining in, as the male gang members sexually abuse her. The Marquis de Sade’s cold message of amoral power-worship, and remorseless crushing of compassion, is summed in the ruthless words message the gang gives Thérèse about her predicament: “[Y]ou must serve either our pleasures or our interests; your poverty imposes the yoke upon you, and you have got to adapt to it.” It’s hard not to think of the working-class girls groomed, raped, and ignored for years, or simply dismissed as “slags”. Whether the abusers drove taxis or flew by private plane, the profile of the girl was similar; the recruitment was through simulated affection and care.

And the use to which the victims are then put follows the same profoundly evil pattern. I choose the word “evil” carefully, as I mean specifically acts that set out intentionally to negate, to destroy, and to desecrate. Whether in the ultra-luxurious setting of Epstein Island, or on squalid mattresses in crumbling British provincial towns, the group-based sexual abuse of very young girls functioned as a form of social bonding, through ritual de-humanization of the desperately vulnerable.

Giuffre describes her own treatment as a thing, as Epstein and Maxwell passed her around “like a platter of fruit”. She also describes wishing for the evacuation of her selfhood: during sex, she says, Epstein subjected her to “so much pain that I prayed I would black out”. And she recounts how her abusers simply saw this as part of her job. When, she alleges, one former minister choked, beat and bloodied her, Epstein, merely said coldly: “You’ll get that sometimes.” Like the rapists in a de Sade story, Epstein simply viewed it as his right to make her suffer at will, simply because he was powerful and she was not. And as in de Sade, her torment was intended to be anti-morally instructive: a means of reinforcing the conspiratorial unity of the Inner Rings that practiced these secret, shared acts of cruelty and libertine, amoral defilement.

Again: like the de Sadean moral worldview, this kind of group bonding is satanic in the precise sense of the word. It is also extraordinarily potent. We can reasonably suppose the Inner Rings thus fostered continue to endure, whether — in Britain — among the rape gangs that remain active to this day, or among the Epstein elite. Indeed, the degree to which Prince Andrew, now no longer the Duke of York, has been hung out to dry, likely attests more to his relative political irrelevance than to the depth of his corruption, extensive though this doubtless was.

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Like Harry, Andrew is a junior “spare”. With tastes as extravagant as his natural abilities are sparse, he has spent his life humiliatingly scrabbling and tin-rattling to make up the shortfall. He is embroiled in the Epstein corruption for the same reason he has always been a royal liability: he wants a lifestyle well beyond his capacity to earn legitimately, and is thus a dear friend to anyone with the money (and the jet) to keep him in the Inner Ring style to which he’d like to remain accustomed.

It is not difficult to imagine a parasite of this caliber viewing the thoughts and feelings of trafficked teenage girls as being of roughly the same importance as those of the maids who cleaned his hotel suite. Giuffre claims that Andrew acted “as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright”. Andrew himself has always strenuously denied these encounters, though Giuffre later took him to court in a case the prince settled in 2022, for an undisclosed sum, without admitting liability.

Virginia Giuffre died earlier this year, reportedly by suicide. Meanwhile, the ongoing shadiness surrounding the whole Epstein network, the mysterious suicides and disappearing video footage and all the sordid rest of it, leaves one wondering how much of the Inner Ring remains intact even as ex-Duke of York Prince Andrew writhes in the media spotlight.

So should we greet this all, glumly, as vindication of the pitiless de Sadean worldview, and its rejection of any refuge or compassion for the victim? Is it true that there’s really nothing but power and desire? I think not. Giuffre’s story is subject to all manner of challenges and attempts at revision. She cannot push back; she is dead. But though she didn’t manage to bring down the entire Inner Ring, I think Giuffre was, ultimately, stronger than those who sought to dehumanize her. Her insistence on having her story heard, on being understood as a person, serves as the most potent rebuttal of all to the de Sadean morality of pure, pitiless power and desire.

Her abusers took Justine as their moral template, and sought to consolidate their Inner Ring by ritually reducing living humans to mere objects. It is a profound evil; the networks thus produced are still with us, as is de Sade’s godless libertarianism. But Giuffre’s insistence, in Nobody’s Girl, on having her story heard was her final act of defiance, of stubborn humanity. The depth of pity and anger her story has inspired, and the shockwaves it is still producing, on its own stands as proof that the Marquis de Sade was wrong.

The unavoidable truth, though, and one that will be central to the inquiry, is that the majority of these rapists were of Pakistani Muslim heritage. This was laid out in an academic study of the topic in 2020, as well Alexis Jay’s 2014 report into the Rotherham component of the abuse. But to attempt to dig deeper into this tendency has hitherto been fraught — as Kemi Badenoch found out earlier this year when she clumsily referred to a certain element of this diaspora as “peasants”.

Inevitably, Badenoch’s comments were met with outrage — mainly because of the terminology she used. But there was an element of truth to her observations. Badenoch was referring to a subsection of the Pakistani community who, over the past decades have made their way to Britain from Mirpur, which is a rural district of Azad Kashmir, the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir. This is a significant diaspora: 70% of Britain’s already numerous Pakistanis can trace their heritage to this poverty-stricken region in their motherland’s north. And to examine it further might be useful.

Mirpuris began to come to the UK, at first in small numbers, more than a century ago. After the Second World War, though, the British government started encouraging young, single men from Mirpur and the surrounding areas to move to the UK’s northern industrial areas to make up for labor shortages in factory towns.

This suited the Mirpuris. Their region sits on the periphery of Kashmir, which was on the Pakistani side of Partition, whose function was essentially to split the subcontinent’s Hindus from its Muslims. One result of the new border was that Mirpuris were now less able to take up jobs in Mumbai. This meant that British jobs became more attractive to villagers.

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Those who remained did not experience much largesse from the new Pakistani state. Mirpur was given little in the way of roads, schools, and other public services. Those who had settled in Britain sent back word to their kinsmen of the new opportunities that were opening up.

The migration was still not large-scale, but that changed in the Sixties. Pakistan’s construction of the Mangla Dam, which began in 1961, had submerged hundreds of villages in the Mirpur District, displacing more than 100,000 people — many of whom moved to Britain. This was the labor migration phase of the chain, which was followed by family migration and reunification in the Seventies and Eighties. The new arrivals were mostly conservative villagers adhering to a rigid set of social and cultural hierarchies. These Mirpuris, like those they were joining in Britain, were not highly educated, and they had little or no experience of urban living in Pakistan. From the Nineties onwards, Mirpuris flowed into the UK through “marriage migration”, with rural and low-skilled men from Kashmir marrying British-born Mirpuris in the UK and moving to towns such as Bradford, Birmingham, Luton and the surrounding areas.

Tony Capstick, an associate professor of language and migration at the University of Reading, has been studying the UK’s Pakistani Mirpuri population for almost 17 years, working closely with families in both Lancashire and Mirpur. “What’s happened, in a nutshell,” says Capstick, “is migrants from a very poor part of the other side of the planet, with completely different religious and cultural practices, have come to live and work in a very disadvantaged part of the UK where already there’s huge social problems”. As a result, these post-industrial towns are now embroiled in “this situation where it’s been difficult for both communities to live together”. Of course, not all British Mirpuris are conservative, and not all of them are reluctant to integrate. But a certain element has preferred to stay in insular communities, choosing to import spouses from villages and small towns in Azad Kashmir. Integration isn’t happening. 

“It’s a reflection of attitudes that one sees not just in Pakistanis in the UK, but that are commonly held by many people in Pakistan as well,” says Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani scientist who is an outspoken critic of religious fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism in Pakistani society. “From what I saw in Birmingham and in Bradford,” says Hoodbhoy, “these communities essentially do not interact with others and look at them with a degree of hostility, particularly when it comes to their women and girls being in contact with the rest of the British population.” 

It is important to note, as Hoodbhoy does, that there is a growing movement within the population and its diaspora to embrace liberal values. Increasingly, the later generations are university educated and increasingly detached from the culture and traditions of their forebears. “But those at the lower end of the social stratum keep an insular existence, and the strong influence of the imams at their local mosques makes it even more difficult for them to break out into mainstream society.”

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Meanwhile, the number of these mosques and madrassas (Islamic schools) have been growing, from 338 mosques in 1985 to over 2,000 today. These institutions sometimes perpetuate an Islamist worldview that prevents the newcomers from seeing themselves as British — as with the hardline Muslims who tried to impose an “intolerant and aggressive” Islamic agenda on some schools in Birmingham. The more radical among them include preachers who encourage their followers to dismiss any notion of their identity being tied to Britain.

As Hoodbhoy suggests, “Britain’s experiment in multiculturalism did not take into account the regressive values that Islam can preach.” And some of those values are at odds with life in liberal Britain, as many are now pointing out. Furthermore, it’s a dynamic, suggests Hoodbhoy, that has allowed a sub-section of the community to utterly avoid integration. Indeed, rather than marrying out, many families choose to bringing over to be “imported husbands” — young men who have come to Britain via the spousal visa scheme.

In 2000, more than ten thousand Pakistani nationals were cleared to join spouses in the UK, around half of whom were male. These “unhappy husbands”, as they have been called by academics, face unenviable challenges on first arriving in the UK. They often don’t have good English, and are expected to conform to their in-laws’ expectations of what a ghar damad (house son-in-law) is supposed to do when it comes to his professional and personal lifestyle choices. Many of these men have to accept low-status employment and contend with being dependent on their spouses for their immigration status.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that this insular community has closed ranks against what it sees as persecution regarding the grooming gang scandal. The loyalties of the men involved, and of the women to whom they are married, are predominantly to their clan. Outsiders are less worthy of moral regard and protection. Might anything change this?

Hoodbhoy thinks change needs to come from the local mosques which hold such influence over the traditions and beliefs of the population. “Proselytisers crossing borders should be banned,” he says. “Madrassas deprive young children of fundamental skills which are needed for surviving in British society, and unless they are reformed in a manner that is clear and transparent to all, they should not be allowed to function.”

Capstick, though, has a more pessimistic view of the future. “I don’t see them assimilating,” he says of the Mirpuris. “I’ve been doing this now for twenty years and I haven’t seen Mirpuri men and women marrying non-Mirpuris, which, after four generations of being here, is quite unusual for a community.” The cultural dysfunction, it seems, will not be easily abated. Indeed, Casey says that grooming gangs are still operating. And as the inquiry gets underway, officials are bound to obfuscate the true extent of the cover-up — because the truth will be too damaging to contemplate.

This was a reference to the English Defence League and its activism around grooming gangs, which was often ugly and divisive. Now there is much to be said about the EDL, which was disbanded in 2013, and what it did about the grooming gangs. But for Casey to confess that her first thought after coming across a piece of evidence that is indicative of a broader cover-up is to ponder how the EDL might stand to benefit from it suggests a rather strange ordering of priorities.

To be fair to Casey, she was responding to a question about whether the fear of being tarnished as a racist had caused the authorities to turn a blind eye to the grooming gangs; her point, although she didn’t quite put it in this way, was that in not wanting to appear as racist, the denialists were, in effect, helping other racists to exploit the issue because no one else — or no one good — was addressing it.

Casey’s core point, in isolation, is a valid and necessary one: the far-Right has indeed sought to gain political capital from the grooming gangs scandal, and it has been given a free rein in this in part because so many others have shied away from confronting the problem. But it’s also true that the preoccupation with how the grooming scandal might conceivably “play into the hands” of the far-Right has been just as corrosive and detrimental as the insidious imperative not to be seen as racist, with both intersecting to produce a culture of denial over the rape gangs.

Julie Bindel, for example, has recounted in UnHerd how, in 2006, The Guardian rejected her pitch about a story of a missing 14-year-old girl from Blackpool who had been targeted by abusers in the town. Bindel, who was one of the first journalists to write about grooming gangs, recalled that her then editor, Katharine Viner, told her: “We would be called racist if we publish this.” In another piece, retelling the same story, Bindel remembers Viner as saying: “The BNP [British National Party] are all over this and it will just add fuel to the fire if we go anywhere near it.” Despite Bindel’s insistence that neither she nor her sources were racist — that she was “a Left-wing feminist concerned about child sexual abuse” — The Guardian passed on the story and the Sunday Times Magazine took it on.

It is impossible to know how many other stories on the grooming gangs were abandoned because editors thought that the far-Right would use them to demonize Muslims and sow discord. It is similarly difficult to know how many writers deliberately avoided the issue or wrote about it in a highly selective way because they thought that anything they said about it might help the far-Right.

In The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence, the Observer’s Andrew Anthony gives an unusually honest account of how, working as a journalist in the Nineties, he would occasionally “turn a blind eye to cultural practices that were problematic or difficult to reconcile with a liberal outlook”. He recalled how, in the course of writing a long feature about crime and policing in East London, he deliberately omitted to include a police officer’s comment about the high incidence of forced marriages and domestic violence among the local Muslim community. “I feared that it might be construed as anti-Muslim,” he wrote.

He also admitted that while working on another story, for which he had temped as a driver for a London minicab firm, he discovered that most of his fellow cab-drivers had been granted or were seeking asylum — or had been turned down. What struck him most about his new colleagues was the “cold contempt” with which they regarded their new home. “Some of the drivers were Taliban sympathizers, some were admirers of Ayatollah Khomeini, but none were pro-British,” he wrote, adding: “Almost none of this I chose to report.” “Why would I write anything that could be construed as a Mail-like attack on a minority?,” he explained, describing his thinking at the time. He also feared that sensationalist reporting on minorities would only serve to fuel hatred towards them.

It is hard to exaggerate just how prevalent and ingrained this mode of thinking is among progressives. George Orwell, writing in Tribune in June 1944, described it as a “sort of charm or incantation to silence uncomfortable truths”. “When you are told that by saying this, that or the other you are ‘playing into the hands of’ some sinister enemy, you know that it is your duty to shut up immediately,” he observed. He also conceded that “objectively” the charge can often be true — that “it is always difficult to attack one party to a dispute without temporarily helping the other”. But he was adamant that the suppression of unpleasant facts was damaging in the long run and that, as he argued in another essay, the cause of progress cannot be served by lies.

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When Bindel’s Sunday Times Magazine investigation was published in 2007, she was roundly condemned by many of her comrades on the Left. A number of people told her that she was playing into the hands of the BNP. “I was truly staggered,” she recalled. “It would appear that I was being told not to wash dirty linen in public, and to hell with the rape and abuse of teenage girls.”

This brings us back to Casey and her implied suggestion that those who suppressed the truth about rape gangs were essentially good people whose motives were well-intentioned, while those on the far-Right who couldn’t keep off the subject were bad people animated by racism. One need not make a fetish of nuance to posit that this is a rather reductive way of looking at the matter, and it certainly flatters the spineless police officers and countless local officials who looked the other way because they didn’t want to displease their superiors or damage their career prospects. It is hard to think of these people as uniformly good. Equally, there are some on the far-Right, notably Tommy Robinson, whose rhetoric about grooming gangs has been incendiary, but who did seek, albeit ham-fistedly, to bring attention to the victims’ plight. Should people like him be seen as wholly bad?

Many would no doubt take issue with this characterization of Robinson — Bindel has insisted that he is “not a man you would usually expect to be interested in the plight of young and abused women” and that his primary concern is to agitate against radical Islam. But might not both of these things be true — that Robinson is broadly motivated by an ideological hostility towards Islam, but also a glimmer of sympathy for the victims of the grooming gangs. Need one exclude the other?

Whatever the case, the temptation among our elites to invoke the spectre of the far-Right whenever the spotlight falls on Muslim rape gangs or jihadi terrorism, or indeed any activity that reflects badly on Muslims, is at best a distraction and at worst an attempt to shut down the kind of honest discussion that Casey’s report sets out.

We don’t know how many have been abused to date. The Jay report revealed 1,400 victims in Rotherham alone, between 1997 and 2013. More than 10 years on, similar gangs have been exposed in more than 50 UK towns: many are still active. Even a conservative calculation on that basis suggests tens if not hundreds of thousands. And since the scandal first came to light, we’ve had inquiry after inquiry. There have been convictions, sometimes of large groups, but every trial reveals that more remain at large.

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All the while, the topic has continued to seep into the groundwater of public awareness. And since Elon Musk fanned the flames afresh in January, Starmer has faced a storm of criticism for refusing to grant a fresh inquiry, only commissioning Baroness Louise Casey to conduct an audit of existing reports. Now, though, the Casey audit has provided an excoriating overview of failure. She recommends new inter-agency reporting rules, a new national police investigation, mandatory data collection on perpetrators’ ethnicity, and changes to the law so that children under 16 can no longer be regarded as having “consented” to sex with an adult. Those victims who were appallingly convicted of “child prostitution” will have their criminal records expunged. She also recommended a new national inquiry.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has pledged to implement it all. As it were casually, as an afterthought, she also noted that the report identified cases where suspects were asylum seekers: no doubt the detail that prompted Starmer to get out in front of feared civil unrest by announcing the inquiry before the report’s release.

Will it be enough? Perhaps 10 years ago it might have been. But though Cooper did her best to sound angry as she noted that we have “lost more than a decade” in addressing the crimes, in fact, we lost far more than that. The omerta was, and still is, stifling. Newspaper clippings hint at abuses dating all the way back to the Seventies; when far-Right groups raised the alarm in the early 2000s, they were mocked for their accents, accused of stirring up hatred, and censored. When Left-wingers and moderates noticed, they didn’t fare much better: Julie Bindel broke the first mainstream press account almost 20 years ago, only to be called racist for her efforts. The late Times journalist Andrew Norfolk paid a professional price for investigating; former Labour MPs Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion faced stonewalling and harassment. And all that time, our institutions went on grimly pretending everything was basically fine. Why?

With the perpetrators now officially acknowledged, beyond any doubt, to be “disproportionately Asian and Pakistani men”, some accuse Starmer of a cover-up motivated by the party’s ongoing reliance on Pakistani “biraderi” clan politics, to deliver votes in many constituencies. Such allegations are still just that – allegations. But there are surely two senses in which Labour had an interest in making this story go away.

First, that as the Casey report acknowledges, the crimes really are mostly committed by ethnic minority men, mostly Pakistani, against white-majority children. And Labour are, far more than any other party, the standard-bearers for “diversity”. On this front, Helen Lewis spelled out the problem with commendable clarity earlier this year: no one on the Left wants a “national conversation” about the rape gangs — because so many of the possible solutions are, from this perspective, prima facie unacceptable:

“Would it include calls for the mass deportation of migrants, as many on Europe’s emergent Right want? […] Should Britain enact a “Muslim ban” or reject asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries? When liberals are still queasy about engaging with this topic, it’s because they sense that these shadow arguments lie just out of sight.”

And second, it’s not just about race relations. It’s also about the public sector, of which Labour has long presented itself as a champion. And the extent of institutional complicity, already clear, is reiterated in Casey’s report: they all knew.

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The police, especially, knew. Victims were blamed, or even arrested: in one notorious incident, a father arrived outside the house in which his own daughter was being raped, called the police, and was then himself arrested. In other incidents, girls would press charges only to be immediately contacted by their rapists with threats: events strongly suggestive of police corruption. One officer in Rotherham told a desperate father that the town “would erupt” if the crimes were exposed; another, according to the 2014 Jay report, admitted these atrocities have been ongoing for 30 years but “with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out”.

Care homes also knew. One Bradford girl reported all the way back in 2014 that the home where she ought to have found safety and respite didn’t just look the other way — when the men who raped and sold her arrived outside the home, the staff would tell her to “go out and see them”. Councils knew, too: Birmingham was suppressing reports into looked-after children being raped and trafficked 30 years ago. In Oldham, the notorious leader of one rape gang was appointed “Welfare Officer” after a girl had already come forward with allegations against him. How many teachers knew? If Dominic Cummings is to be believed, the Department of Education knew.

The truth is that these gangs are a Frankenstein’s monster hatched in the public sector, and shielded by its operant dogmas. All of the incentives in our modern institutions tended toward burying their crimes — from the cold charity and misapplied cant about “autonomy”, that enabled troubled adolescent girls to come and go from care homes to their rapists, to the police fixation on “community relations”, that misbegotten child of multiculturalism and policing by consent, to the national-level emphasis on “multiculturalism” and reflexive contempt for the white working class.

Everyone wanted the Pakistani rape gangs to be racist nonsense. “Diversity” and a large, costly public sector are load-bearing pillars of the whole modern British social contract. It really wasn’t just the Left: the difference in complicity between Labour and the other mainstream parties is a matter of degree, not kind.

Now, though, it’s Labour, above all others the party of diversity and the public sector, in the unhappy position of needing to prove — rapidly, and to a mutinously angry electorate — that these pillars of “modern Britain” can be upheld, without this necessarily coming at the expense of brutalized working-class girls. Will it work? On the inquiry, Cooper has promised a nationally led effort that will force recalcitrant local officials to stop covering up failures. And who knows, perhaps it’ll be different this time. But the Grenfell inquiry spent seven years and £177 million telling us what we already knew about bad bureaucracies, only to recommend a solution mostly composed of more bureaucracy. As a public inquiry into public inquiries conducted by the House of Lords in 2024 concluded, recommendations are often not implemented. No wonder the public has come to see them as an expensive, time-consuming way of kicking the can down the road.

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And even if it is different this time, it’s unclear whether the raft of measures Cooper has announced will be enough to reassure the public that Labour’s response has shifted from pathological deferral-by-process to something resembling action. I suspect that very little would do so, short of a kind of blue-sky radicalism wholly absent from mainstream politics. Instead, though everything points to this as a problem insoluble within the existing system’s terms, Labour still appears to be clinging desperately to those existing terms.

Witness Cooper’s insistence that what we’re talking about here is the “depravity of a minority”, and that this mustn’t be used to “marginalize whole communities”. Meanwhile everything we know about clan-based as opposed to Anglophone individualistic cultures suggests collective responsibility is in fact the right response. So if it turns out that the only way of actually tackling the problem really is “marginalizing whole communities”, would Labour be willing to restore trust in the system by actually doing so? The answer is surely no.

Still more unthinkably, for all the mainstream parties, the extent of institutional corruption suggests that actually tackling these systemic failures would require more than some new procedures, or throwing a few mid-ranking officials under the bus. That it would, in fact, require razing every one of the institutions, ideologies, proscriptions, and ruling-class shibboleths, that treated the victimization of tens of thousands of white working-class girls as acceptable collateral damage in the construction of “modern Britain”.

But nothing in Cooper’s speech today gave any indication of willingness to touch these sacred foundations. Instead, Labour’s announcements amount to yet another cleanup operation on behalf of the overall diversity-and-big-welfare regime, that seeks only to scrub away the most egregious evidence of its inability to protect those it was founded to serve. With every mounting sign of this paralysis, growing numbers of those citizens begin to wonder if the change we need is of a more fundamental kind.

Blanketed in two inches of snow, Keighley is a feast of pretty houses. Residents shuffle through its icy backstreets. Children throw snowballs. Deep in the Pennine moors of Brontë Country, Keighley once boasted a proud history: the birthplace of Yorkshire’s first cotton mill, a heritage steam railway, and Timothy Taylor beer.

But in 2002, it became the birthplace of Britain’s “grooming gangs” shame. It was in Keighley that Ann Cryer, the town’s Labour MP, became the first politician to expose how groups of Pakistani men were preying on predominantly white girls — drugging them, abusing them, raping them. And it was in Keighley, a year later, that the first grooming gang conviction was secured.

Yet over the following decades, the town’s victims — some not even in their teens — were gradually forgotten. Attention was drawn, instead, to Rotherham, Rochdale, Oldham and Telford, each suffering predatory horrors of their own. Of the 10 inquiries and reports that have since been held into the scandal, none focuses on Keighley. It has been much the same over the past fortnight. Spurred on by the wild tweets of an American billionaire, the subject of grooming gangs has again been turned into a game of political football — with Keighley again ignored.

In recent years, in fact, only one national newspaper has done any significant reporting on the town: The New York Times sent a reporter to write a soft feature about the Keighley Cougars, a Rugby League team with a new kit designed to match the colours of the trans flag. Before their first match, a drag queen performed “It’s Raining Men”. Today, the stadium’s gates are named after Captain Tom Moore, another child of Keighley.

One man shuffling along the ice is Martin Thompson, who has lived here for 50 years. He dismisses the past fortnight’s feverish debate. “Elon Musk is just jumping on the bandwagon,” he says. “This will die down and he’ll move on to the next thing.” An unenthusiastic Labour voter in last year’s election — Keighley and Ilkey is a rare bellwether that remained Conservative — he has little time for Nigel Farage or “hateful” Tommy Robinson. “None of them really care about us,” he says.

***

Keighley’s exorcism began in 2002, when seven distressed mothers appeared one morning at Cryer’s constituency office on Devonshire Street. They didn’t know where else to turn. Their daughters, they explained, were being befriended by older men from Keighley’s Pakistani community, who make up roughly half of the town’s central ward. The girls were then taken to parties, plied with drugs, and sexually abused. The mothers handed Cryer a list of the names and addresses of 65 men they believed were implicated. They had made similar complaints to the police and social services — but had been ignored. They were desperate.

After Cryer was also stonewalled by the police, she spoke out publicly: about the girls, some as young as 11, who were being abused, and about the ethnicity of their attackers. Less publicly, Cryer tried to meet with religious leaders in the Pakistani community, after she learnt that the News of the World had offered the victims’ mothers £1,000 to tell their story. She feared the damage that a media paroxysm would inflict on the town. “We could have race riots,” she later warned. But when she approached elders at one of Keighley’s mosques with a smaller list of 35 alleged perpetrators, Cryer was told it had nothing to do with them. Members of her own party disowned her as a racist. After receiving threats to her life, she was advised to install a panic alarm at home.

Race riots didn’t follow, but tensions started to simmer. The following year, in November 2003, after the police finally launched an investigation, Delwar Hussein, a 24-year-old youth worker who groomed and had sex with a 13-year-old girl, became the first man on Cryer’s list to be convicted. It should have represented a grim act of closure for the girl and her family. Instead, the case was seized on by the British National Party, who used it to blame the local Labour council.

By May 2004, with a local election looming, the BNP were confident they could win. Three weeks before polling day, Channel 4 pulled a documentary about the area’s grooming gangs after anti-fascist campaigners and the police warned it could play into the hands of the far-Right. “A lot of them have a way with words to make you feel you’re gorgeous,” said one 14-year-old girl in the programme of her groomers. “He told me he loved me and how beautiful I was. I thought I loved him.”

Yet the BNP parlayed the censorship to their advantage, claiming that only they could protect Keighley’s girls. Nick Griffin, the party’s leader, held a rally at the town’s Reservoir Tavern, in which he described Islam as “a wicked vicious faith” and railed against the Muslims turning Britain into a “multiracial hellhole”. His rhetoric found purchase, and the BNP won the ward of Keighley West.

Their victory, however, was temporary, and the BNP were evicted almost as quickly as they arrived. In the 2005 general election, Nick Griffin was beaten into fourth place. The following year, after a by-election was held, Keighley West was won by Angela Sinfield, a mother of one of the grooming victims who had joined the Labour Party the year before. As she said at the time: “The BNP used [the scandal] for their own ends without ever doing anything concrete about it — and for me that is unforgivable.”

***

Jean Gee was there at the start with Ann Cryer. Now 77, the former social worker helped to introduce the MP to the victims’ mothers in 2002. “I used to work with kids who were excluded from school,” she tells me. “And I’d see first-hand how they were picked up by men in their taxis.” At the time, Jean didn’t know that one of the girls would be a close family member.

Amber* was raped just over a decade ago by a man she believed was a friend of her father’s. Unlike a number of the town’s victims, who have left, fearful that their attackers still walk its streets, Amber still lives in Keighley. Every day is a reminder of her trauma. She suffers from a severe eating disorder that has left her unable to have children. Her body is skeletal, her arms tattooed. “It marks a girl for life,” Jean says.

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Around the same time as Amber was being groomed, a gang of 12 men were targeting a 13-year-old girl, Autumn*. The torment she would endure — over 13 months between 2011 and 2012 — would become Keighley’s darkest chapter. During one incident, she was gang-raped by five men; during another, she was raped in an underground car park next to a wall brazenly graffitied with the names of some of her attackers.

In 2016, Autumn’s 12 attackers were convicted — and the judge found she’d been failed by police and social workers. After one attack, officers dismissed her as a prostitute; after another, they failed to progress a medical assessment. As for her abusers, the judge concluded that “they saw her as a pathetic figure who… served no purpose than to be an object that they could sexually misuse and cast aside”. In their mugshots, two of her attackers are smiling.

Autumn’s younger brother, Adam*, now in his early 20s, believes the past fortnight’s debate over grooming gangs is fuelled by hypocrisy. “Politicians of all stripes colluded with the police to engage in a cover-up,” he tells me. He blames the Conservative Party for “failing to act on this issue despite so many cases occurring under them”. And he blames Labour, whose leader this week suggested it was a “far-Right” issue, despite the “most impacted areas being run by that party”. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform — which registered 10% of the vote in Keighley in last year’s general election, well below its national average — is also trying to make political hay. “At least the SDP here have always prioritised the issue of grooming gangs,” he says. As for Elon Musk, who described Labour MP Jess Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” and called for Tommy Robinson to be released from prison, Adam views him as “clearly unstable” but welcomes his intervention. “Anything that brings attention to this issue is good,” he says.

Back in town, though, most are oblivious to this week’s political mudslinging, which culminated on Wednesday in a failed Conservative vote to force a new inquiry. Few of those I speak to — Pakistani and white, young and old — are aware of Musk’s recent comments. “If Tommy Robinson came to Keighley, he’d get beaten up,” says one white woman in her early-20s. “When will [Pretoria-born] Musk start tweeting about South Africa’s race problems?” jokes one bemused madrasah teacher.

There’s a similar lack of consensus over calls for a new inquiry into West Yorkshire’s grooming gangs. This is partly because people doubt its sincerity; neither the Conservatives nor Reform mentioned an inquiry in last year’s manifestos. But it’s mostly because few believe another investigation will be acted upon. “What would the value be?” says Gee, who voted Conservative last year. “How likely is it that something will happen? It’s not as if we have the money to change anything. Just look at our housing and social care system.”

Even Adam has his reservations. “What comes after? We need to deal with the source and not just address the past.” Typical was one stallholder in Keighley’s indoor market. “I know I’d feel different if my daughter was one of the victims,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s a priority now.” Keighley, she points out, may be pretty — but it isn’t thriving. In some neighbourhoods, 40% of households are classified as deprived.

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Still, there are attempts to learn from the past. After school, youth workers patrol the shopping centre and adjoining bus station where many of the town’s victims were once ensnared. “There are still creeps around,” says one teenage girl. “But they’re not just Pakistani. To be honest, they’re more likely to be a 60-year-old white guy.”

There are those, however, who remain concerned that former groomers have gone unpunished. After all, if Cryer and those seven mothers were correct, and there were at least 35 offenders in the town, not all have been caught. “Membership of these gangs is informal and often it’s hard to pin down members,” says Adam, who still believes the abusers walk the town’s streets. “You also can’t blame girls who haven’t come forward given the police’s previous failures.” Jean agrees, though also believes many “grooming gangs” have been replaced by county lines gangs, whose members are both Pakistani and white. Just this month, more than 50 members of one such gang in Keighley — peddling heroin and crack cocaine — were arrested by police.

But such developments don’t fit into the narrative of Britain’s national debate — a binary war, fought mostly online, between those uncomfortable with highlighting the ethnicity of West Yorkshire’s grooming gangs and those who seek to exploit it. Meanwhile, the affected communities are viewed as collateral. As one fed up local told me: “We’ve got enough wars going on without your Tommy Robinsons starting another.”

In Keighley, few are worried about the return of the far-Right. Their Conservative MP, Robbie Moore, has been outspoken about the need for another inquiry, neutralising movements further to the Right. In 2017, the EDL tried to hold a protest in the town and were outnumbered by police. But there’s still disquiet. In 2022, three members of a neo-Nazi cell in Keighley were jailed after being caught buying a 3D printer to make a gun. The following year, a teenager was jailed after he planned to attack one of the town’s mosques while disguised as an armed police officer.

Nor has faith in its institutions been restored. Last November, the town was left horrified when a local police officer was jailed for having sex with a vulnerable domestic abuse victim whose complaints he had been tasked with investigating. When I asked West Yorkshire Police how it hopes to regain Keighley’s trust after decades of neglect, I was told the officer’s “offending was not connected to grooming gangs” and redirected to an old press release.

But it feels connected, feeding into a pattern of betrayal. Despite the best efforts of a noble MP, Keighley remains a case study in exploitation — first by a terrified establishment who ignored the abuse of the town’s young girls, and then by a far-Right menace who sought to capitalise on their cowardice. And now, as attempts are made to reheat their trauma, Keighley’s residents might be forgiven for their ambivalence. They’ve seen this before, and know how it ends. The fires of our digital ecosystem will consume its subjects. But in Keighley, cold resignation preserves them.

*Names have been changed

A new report suggests that the drinking habits of our young women outmatch those of boys here, as well as beating most teenagers in the rest of Europe. More than a third of young women in the UK reported being drunk at least twice by the age of 15, a figure only bested by the stats of young Danes, Hungarians, and Italians. In reality, teenage drinking is markedly down compared to former levels: in 2002, for instance, a staggering 41% of Scottish teenagers of both sexes apparently drank weekly. But in these health-conscious times, even moderate amounts of teen drinking are viewed as too much. A similarly disapproving conclusion was drawn by the World Health Organization last April, though in that case, impressively, both boys and girls in the UK came out Top of the Alcopops rather than 4th.

Worried about supposed adverse effects on brain development, and trying to explain the appeal of drinking to young women in particular, commentators tend to approach the subject of teenage kicks as if observing puzzling behavioral manifestations in an alien species. Some suggest that girls are simply copying their mothers, since British women hold the dubious honor of being Europe’s biggest female binge-drinkers. Others blame intensified feelings of social anxiety post-lockdown, targeted advertising from the drinks industry towards females, and that old fallback, middle-class parents for introducing youngsters to wine too early.

Meanwhile, no one mentions the joyfully emboldened swagger of being newly out on the lash; how feelings of effervescence intermittently course through your body as you dance, flirt, smoke, or double over in hysterical mirth at someone’s stupid joke, or your own; how, in short, you feel like a sexy superhero — until you don’t. To help me remember, I still have photographs from my first ever night on the booze at a friend’s house in Edinburgh, our parents having their own party downstairs. Groups of us loll about on the floor with our mouths in perpetual motion, talking endlessly, babyfaces hectically flushed, eyes sparkling and slightly wild. Sometimes I suspect my adult drinking patterns have been chasing that sort of fabulous high ever since.

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Film and television do slightly better, with Sex and the City leading the way in glamorizing cocktail consumption for a generation. But when you are a youngster constrained by licensing laws, it is all fairly irrelevant anyway: you can only dream of having wry discussions about men’s sexual prowess over several cosmopolitans in some iconic Manhattan nightspot. Along with millions of others before you under strict conditions of prohibition, the best you can do is gulp it down unadorned in a bedroom or at some wintry bus stop, discreetly and fast, and wait for those exciting sensations of warmth to start radiating outward from your core.

Chasing this rush, intensified when cut with youthful emotions and surging hormones, is surely the main reason teenagers drink, be they female or male. Impersonal accounts of possible causes — rising anxiety, say, or the influence of social media — miss out this crucial part of the explanation. And I’m not sure we should expect or even want anything different. William James wrote of alcohol’s power to “stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature”, arguing that while “sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no, drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes”. And who should be saying yes to life more than mystically minded, big-hearted, uproarious teenagers? There is nothing more developmentally appropriate. In a society where so many of them seem isolated in dark rooms, either metaphorically or literally, the odd outbreak of intensely sociable drunkenness seems like a small worry to have overall.

Inebriation makes you vulnerable in other ways, though — and perhaps especially so in the case of girls. The disinhibition it brings, and the subjective dislocation from time and space, spell trouble in the wrong company. Alongside the report about teenage drinking, this week there has also been a lot of discussion of Pakistani grooming gangs on X; and the two make for uncomfortable juxtaposition. Extracts circulated from court transcripts underline that alcohol and drugs were the main means used by child rapists to subdue their underage working-class victims. And yet social workers and police repeatedly read the drunkenness of these young girls as a sign of maturity, in a way which somehow made the girls more culpable than the psychopathic men abusing them.

One social worker accused the terrified mother of an exploited 14-year-old engaged in “repeated incidents of severe intoxication” of not being able to accept that her daughter was “growing up”. A 12-year-old was arrested for being “drunk and disorderly” in a derelict house while the accompanying adult males were left unadmonished. In other words, an adultification bias was thriving; and when it comes to persistent stereotypes of fresh-faced young innocence and the “right” sort of victim, it seems that years of feminism have failed to touch the sides.

So much celebratory alcohol use is transitional, taking us from the end of one thing to the beginning of another thing: from day to evening, for instance, or from working day to weekend. In taking the drink that indicates the changeover, you are not simply marking a shift in attitude as creating one out of nothing, wrestling it into being with your intention that things will be brighter and better now. Much teenage drinking is transitional like this too: by necking the stuff, typically you indicate an intention to leave something childish behind and become your own more adventurous person for a night, whatever that means. Of course that doesn’t mean you succeed, as thousands of undignified exits from teen parties can attest. Still, the pleasure is in the attempt, and it is an agenda apparently ferociously pursued by middle- and upper-class teenagers in particular, with few lasting consequences except for the very unlucky.

One of the many hideous features of the grooming gang scandal was that young girls’ natural and age-appropriate desire for a few cathartic, drink-fueled escapades was used against them so heinously, twice over: first by their abusers, and then by the authorities who failed to recognize what was going on. We need to try harder to see the drunkenness of the teenager for what it nearly always is: something essentially childish and innocent; a kind of riotous, joyful inebriation that cannot be replicated later as a fully fledged adult, no matter how hard you might try. The ideal world is not one where such a thing never occurs, but one where teenagers are never violated or otherwise penalized for now and again succumbing. Thanks to malevolent actors, we don’t live in that ideal world and never will; but along with my teenage liver, I mourn it.

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It’s bleak here. The main shopping area, Yorkshire Street, is a sad parade of charity shops, discount stores, and closed-down businesses. Each time I go, I see more and more homeless people on the street. And the stories of poverty and neglect are heart-breaking. In 2020, a toddler died from a respiratory condition caused by mould in the housing association property he lived in. Shockingly, his death changed nothing: it’s still a widespread problem, almost four years on.

Steeped in political scandal and poverty as it is, things could be about to get a whole lot worse. The result of today’s contentious by-election could mean the infamous constituency could end up represented in Parliament by a clown.

Once the pride of industrial Britain, the town was soiled redeemably by “Mr Rochdale” for decades. Real name Cyril Smith, he became a Labour councillor in 1952 at the age of 23, and was Rochdale’s MP from 1972 until he retired from Parliament in 1992. He managed to sustain this lengthy term in office despite multiple allegations of profoundly inappropriate behaviour. In total, eight men alleged that Smith had indecently assaulted them as teenagers in the Sixties; six of them were living at a residential establishment for boys named Cambridge House Hostel, which Smith had been involved in setting up.

When the Director of Public Prosecutions was informed in 1970, the advice was not to prosecute. That advice was reviewed by the Crown Prosecution Service in 1998 and 1999, when two further complainants were identified. Yet neither review led to Smith being charged. He was knighted in 1988, and died in 2010.

It’s only in the years since his death that the extent of his shocking behaviour has been revealed. Among other things, it transpired that in his spare time, Smith had been taking money from — and being handed shares in — a local asbestos firm in return for delivering speeches in parliament minimising its dangers. Then, as part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), published in 2022, Lord David Steel stated that Smith had told him that media reports of his abuse of children were true. Yet Steel had allowed Smith to continue in office until he stepped down in 1992. The police, I’m told, were in his pocket. The IICSA report stated that this was not the case, but it’s easy to be sceptical when you’re even slightly familiar with his corruption.

Smith’s moral depravity cast a dark shadow across Rochdale where the authorities have a long history of turning a blind eye to abuse of the vulnerable. In the Smith Street public toilets scandal, for example, boys as young as primary school age were sexually abused by men for the price of an ice lolly in full view of the Social Services Department. The Child Protection Manager later described how she would regularly notice boys sitting on the walls and being beckoned by men to follow them inside. It was obvious to her and other staff who witnessed it that sexual abuse was happening. And in March 1989, representatives from the police, social services and schools met to discuss what was happening to a group of children aged 10-14 when they gathered daily at a local restaurant named “Tasty Bites”, when they should have been at school. Of the 12 children identified, five were in the care of Rochdale and a number were being paid for sex.

As the IICSA report made clear,  allegations of sexual assault were simply not taken seriously by those in authority — a culture that infected the council for years, and endured right up to the moment the grooming gang scandal that also took place in Tasty Bites was finally laid bare in 2012. Dozens of vulnerable girls — some as young as 14 — had been plied with alcohol and cannabis, threatened with violence, and passed around man after man for sex, while the authorities ignored their pleas for help. The ringleader was found guilty of 30 counts of rape. A string of inquiries followed, concluding that those in authority “lacked human compassion” and were “inexcusably slow” in dealing with the victims — who were seen as making “life choices”, rather than suffering.

There’s little doubt that Smith’s 20-year reign set in stone the culture of corruption, lethargy and abject failure of its statutory services that lingers. To this day, Rochdale is offered a dire choice of politicians. It’s difficult to believe that many voters will be inspired to turn out to vote for any of them. It is a battle between an ultra-macho, all-male list of prospective MPs, fought along Israeli-Palestinian lines, rather than between political parties. Amid the chaotic run-up, the Labour and Green parties dropped their candidates; not one woman is standing.

It’s an unedifying list of characters and Azhar Ali, is pretty representative of the calibre: a Labour Councillor who trotted out antisemitic conspiracy theories at a public meeting: he’s now out of the party, yet still standing. George Galloway, also accused in the past of antisemitism, is also standing — and is the favourite to win. He wants to “make Rochdale great again” — which makes you wonder when exactly he’s referring to. Standing for the Workers Party for Britain, he claims that he would save Rochdale AFC, and reopen the market. He also has the dubious honour of being endorsed by Nick Griffin, head of the British National Party. (Galloway rejected the endorsement.)

Galloway knows his audience. Rochdale is 19% ethnically Asian, and 13.9% Muslim — one of the biggest communities in the country — and appealing to ethnically Asian Muslims has always served the Scottish Catholic politician very well. When he won Bradford West from Labour in 2012 by a massive majority, he announced his victory through a megaphone, shouting, “All praise to Allah!” During that by-election campaign, Galloway produced a leaflet reading:

“I’m a better Pakistani than [Imran Hussain, the Labour candidate] will ever be. God knows who’s a Muslim and who is not. And a man that’s never out of the pub shouldn’t be going around telling people you should vote for him because he’s a Muslim.”

His success was short-lived: he lost the seat in 2015, to Naseem (Naz) Shah, a local of Pakistani Muslim origin. During his campaign he repeatedly insinuated that Shah was pro-Israel, despite the fact that she had regularly and publicly expressed support for Gaza and Palestine. I accompanied Shah on her campaign trail back then, and was told by a number of Pakistani Muslim voters that they were sick of Galloway posturing while doing little for the community. “He expects us to vote the way the men do,” one Muslim woman told me, “so ignores the women.” Undeterred by his failure in Bradford, he has set his sights on Rochdale.

Also standing is Guy Otten, originally a Green Party candidate who was disowned when old social media posts (from 2013, 2014 and 2015) cast him in a questionable light. In one, he wrote: “The Koran is full of war, slaughter, rape and pillage with genocide and slavery as well. It’s not fit for the 21st century.” In other words, as well as the two candidates accused of antisemitism, there’s one who’s been accused on anti-Muslim prejudice.

And then, last but not least, there is Simon Danczuk, the disgraced former Labour MP for Rochdale. Now running for Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party), Danczuk launched his campaign by taking aim at his old party with a “work not woke” slogan. He has now pivoted to describing himself as the only alternative to Galloway, with a slightly less catchy motto: “Rochdale not Gaza.” In other words, he is also trying to capitalise on the tensions in the town over race, religion and ethnicity. Whether he has a vision for addressing poverty is less certain.

It is worth mentioning here why, exactly, Danczuk was kicked out of Labour. In March 2015 he made headlines because he appeared to have liked hardcore pornography on Twitter. He blamed an iPhone glitch, but admitted to having used porn, saying “I think we should not be too sanctimonious about this”. (Owen Jones wrote a column in defence of Danczuk, for the Guardian.) Then, in December that year, Danczuk was suspended. He had sexted 17-year-old Sophena Houlihan saying: “You want me to spank you?” and “God I’m horny!” Houlihan says she was bombarded with explicit messages for a month after asking him for a summer job in his Rochdale constituency office.

This candidate list is a tragedy. No wonder the people of Rochdale have lost faith in politics. Perhaps most disappointing is Labour’s failure: the party should have been a first choice for the majority of voters in a town that has been so abandoned by the bourgeoisie. Instead, its best hope is to become a case study that helps Labour understand why so many working-class northerners are turning their backs on the party that is supposed to represent them. The disenfranchised, impoverished people of Rochdale embody the negative consequences of exactly the kind of poverty and marginalisation that Labour romanticises or makes use of. But its residents are too angry, too battered to spark a revolution. In perhaps an attempt at protest, 60% of the town voted for Brexit in 2016.

What this means for the future of politics is as bleak as it is worrying. At times like this, when the downtrodden can neither take another kicking nor find the strength to get up from the ground and carry on, it is easy to get sucked into a world in which any enemy of an enemy is a friend. Rochdale, having been abused and abandoned by the state, exemplifies how and why dangerous, disgraceful politicians get elected. The beleaguered town deserves far better than any of the men currently vying to be its MP. Whoever wins this election, Rochdale will lose.

When he was eight, Rahim told one of his sisters that he had seen their uncle naked on numerous occasions. Both of them realised that they, along with their other sister, were being sexually abused after their daily Quran class with him. “Each day he’d pick who gets to leave and who gets to stay,” Rahim says. “I got the worst of it.”

In the liberal West, just implying that Pakistani communities have high rates of child sexual abuse (CSA) can result in accusations of bigotry. The subject is even more unmentionable in Pakistan itself. The nation has one of the highest rates of child sexual abuse in the world: over half a million children are raped there every year. (That is a conservative estimate.) According to recent reports, children are most at risk from the age of six, with nine being the most common age to be raped.

As the grooming gang scandals erupting in the UK have shown, this permissive attitude towards CSA seems to be spreading. A new documentary by GBNews attempts to uncover why the abuse scandal in Rotherham — in which more than 1,500 underage, often impoverished, white girls were groomed and raped by gangs of Pakistani men — was allowed to go on for decades without the authorities intervening. One obvious reason is that these authorities were afraid of being seen as “racist” for focusing the investigation on the predominantly Pakistani men who are running these rings. But it’s equally important to recognise that these crimes were covered up by the Pakistani community itself, which allowed abusers to continue with impunity. The documentary shows how Pakistani-British policemen and Rotherham city councillors either tried to suppress reports about the scandal, or deny it was happening at all.

To reject the uncomfortable truth is the modus operandi in Pakistan, where more than 12 children are reported to be sexually abused every day. In the tight-knit, working-class communities where it’s most likely to take place, fear of bringing “shame” on the family is prioritised over safeguarding individuals, even if they’re children. A conservative attitude towards discussing topics of a sexual nature doesn’t help. A 2013 report by Save The Children offers an insight into how family dynamics play out when CSA is uncovered in Pakistan, where its prevalence “appears to be high”. Of the 99% of mothers in Pakistan who were aware of CSA, around one-fifth either considered children as compliant, or blamed them for the abuse. Confronted with the grizzly details of such crimes, it is common for Pakistanis to downplay their severity, with men often seeing it as “a part of life”, to use the report’s phrase.

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In Rahim’s family, when the eldest sister finally told their mother that an uncle had regularly raped three of the four children in the house, Rahim’s mother didn’t believe her, instead accusing her of “being hysterical and dramatic”. When her siblings insisted that the abuse was, in fact, happening, their mother finally confronted the uncle — but didn’t mention it to Rahim’s father, a marine engineer who was away from home for up to 10 months of the year. The uncle apologised, and the abuse stopped — but just for a few months. It was only when the uncle got married and moved out that the children’s five-year ordeal finally came to an end. By then, Rahim says, the eldest sister’s “problems started manifesting because of the trauma and she started rebelling”, eventually running away from home and telling the authorities about the abuse. When Rahim’s father was told, he didn’t believe any of it was true.

We have to recognise that these attitudes are cultural, if we are to understand what happened in Rotherham. Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of The Ramadhan Foundation UK, has often commented on the over-representation of Pakistani men involved in grooming gangs in the West: “They think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought.” In communities where parents are willing to sacrifice their own children in order to “keep the peace”, it’s rare for anyone to stick their neck out to speak up for the rights of poor and vulnerable white girls, who are considered outsiders. The general attitude seems to be: those non-Muslim “white slags” had it coming.

Predators exploit the high-trust environment enjoyed by citizens in more developed nations, such as the UK and Canada. Girls outside the Pakistani community are more accessible to predators because they have greater social freedom; the most accessible are those without reliable carers. One of the eeriest moments in the documentary was when a victim of the grooming gangs described what happened to her as “normal”. The sexual abuse of young girls like her was so commonplace in these towns, they didn’t think it was unusual to be drugged, gang raped, and trafficked by young men who passed themselves off as the girls’ boyfriends. Is this what a multicultural society is supposed to tolerate under the guise of “social cohesion”?

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Unfortunately, the Pakistani community is still not ready to talk about CSA — a fact recognised by those few British Pakistanis who have spoken out against it. Shame and honour codes hold too much power, and those codes are hard to change. Shafiq, of The Ramadhan Foundation, notes that “for years some British Pakistanis have deliberately buried their heads in the sand about these predatory grooming gangs”. When family members of perpetrators were interviewed, they described white girls as “filthy”, commenting on their clothing, and saying, “they have no shame, no fear of Allah”. When asked how she would feel if her own daughter were abused, the Pakistani wife of one of the predators replied: “It can’t happen to our children because they are not in the streets. We look after them.”

When Rahim’s uncle was finally arrested, following the revelation that he had abused other children in the neighbourhood, the Pakistani community came together to do damage control. By this point, the abuser had two young children of his own. Rahim’s parents were advised by other Pakistani immigrants not to talk about his crimes because “they didn’t want the family’s image to be tarnished in the community”. They put pressure on Rahim to write a letter to the judge asking for a lighter sentence, their logic being that his cousins shouldn’t be made to grow up without a father.

“I was young at the time,” Rahim reflects. “I just did whatever the adults told me to do, so I wrote it.” His uncle went to prison for two years. When he was released, he and his family moved to Alberta. “His wife never left him, and his kids have no idea,” Rahim says. Rahim’s father forgave his brother, and even flew across the country to meet with him. “When he was in prison, everyone asked where he was, and we just lied and said he got a job up in the Northwest Territories and he’s making a lot of money up there. It was the community convincing my parents to cover it up.”

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Tragic as it is, Rahim’s story is not unusual. It illustrates how sexual abuse goes unchecked within Pakistani communities. Rapists know that the community will not ostracise them. They’ll never be without a home or a job. Their mothers, siblings, wives and friends will actually cover for them. Even if they are convicted, they will most likely spend only a few years behind bars before they’re free to re-offend. They may even be encouraged to see themselves as victims of a racist criminal justice system that treats minorities unfairly. In Shafiq’s words: “They believe it is they who are victims of a racist witch-hunt — despite the fact that Pakistani gangs were allowed to rape their way around Rotherham for so long because, in part, politically correct officials were terrified of being accused of racism. They see any of us who try to tackle this problem as siding with the white ‘enemy’.”

Sadly, there is little hope of justice for the victims of grooming gangs in the UK without the cooperation of the Pakistani community. And unless Pakistanis find the courage to shine a light on what is an atrocious open secret within our communities, I fear what happened in Rotherham will continue to happen, devastating the lives of countless children and women, immigrant or otherwise. It pains me to think that what has recently been discovered is just the tip of the iceberg. Right now, there is plenty more abuse taking place across the UK within insular Pakistani communities. And change can only come about if we set aside the tribal instincts that have enabled one of the worst cases of child sexual exploitation in modern history.

*Name changed to protect the identity of the victim.