The grooming-gang scandal is a stain on elite feminism

That the scandal of so-called grooming gangs is finally gaining the attention it deserves is no thanks to Britain’s elite feminists – the very people you might expect to be standing up for women and girls. The systematic rape and sexual abuse of mainly white working-class girls, many of whom were in local authority care, by groups of mostly Pakistani-heritage men has been known about for decades. But the #MeToo crowd were silent when these stories first emerged and remain largely silent now.

Labour’s Jess Phillips is rightly coming under fire for rejecting Oldham Council’s request to hold a national inquiry into how the rape gangs in that area got away with it for so long. As Lauren Smith pointed out last week on spiked, Phillips’s betrayal stings, not just because she is the UK government’s safeguarding minister, but also because the famously bolshy Brummie ‘poses as a straight-talking, no-nonsense feminist’. Yet her feminism seems to have evaporated on contact with the grooming-gangs scandal.

Still, Phillips is far from the only establishment feminist happy to talk about anything other than grooming gangs. The now thankfully defunct Women’s Equality Party, for years the UK’s ‘only feminist party’, was far more preoccupied with backing gender self-identification than speaking out about the horrors of grooming gangs. It cared more about making sure men in dresses were free to enter women’s toilets and changing rooms than it did about the plight of 11-year-old girls in Telford. Then there’s the Fawcett Society, a charity dedicated to ‘advancing women’s equality since 1866’. Its national conference, happening next month, will feature workshops on ‘tackling the rise of populism’, ‘revolutionising work’ and ‘creating feminist AI’. If there is a session dedicated to tackling systemic sexual abuse of girls perpetrated by mainly Pakistani Muslim men in northern towns, then the organisers are keeping it well hidden.

Since news of the grooming gangs first broke more than two decades ago, high-profile campaigns have been launched for period positivity, menopause awareness and higher wages for the BBC’s already well-renumerated female presenters. We’ve talked endlessly about sexist thermostat settings in offices and the problem of men looking at women on the Tube. Labour MP Stella Creasy has waged a one-woman campaign to normalise breastfeeding in the House of Commons. None of these campaigns has done anything to help those teenage girls in Rotherham.

The most egregious silence of all comes from the feminists behind the #MeToo movement that took off in 2017. Serious accusations against Hollywood’s Harvey Weinstein quickly became a springboard for hundreds of thousands of women to take to social media to share their own experiences of sexual harassment. An avalanche of global press coverage followed, lasting not just a couple of days, but several years. Newspaper front pages were given over to journalist Kate Maltby’s ‘fleetingly touched’ knee. Twitterstorms raged over comedian Aziz Ansari failing to offer his date a choice between red or white wine. Most recently, global outrage followed the former head of the Spanish football federation, Luis Rubiales, planting a second-long kiss on the lips of footballer Jenni Hermoso after the 2023 Women’s World Cup final. We can only imagine how much more quickly rape gangs in Oldham might have been thwarted if they had been subjected to half as much scrutiny.

The failure of #MeToo feminists to address the issue of grooming gangs is shameful. To their credit, many women did indeed speak out. As far back as 2002, Labour’s Ann Cryer became the first public figure to talk about ‘young Asian lads’ grooming underage white girls in her Keighley constituency. In 2017, Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, wrote in the Sun that ‘Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls’. Journalist Julie Bindel has been covering this issue for well over two decades. Margaret Oliver, a former detective constable with the Greater Manchester Police, exposed the poor handling of the Rochdale child-abuse ring by her own force.

Yet rather than these women being praised for bringing rape gangs to public attention, much of the supposed feminist ‘sisterhood’ scarpered. Cryer was ignored by police and social services, and branded racist by local imams. Sarah Champion was demonised by Corbynistas and forced out of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Oliver had to resign from the police force in order to blow the whistle on her colleagues. Julie Bindel was busy facing cancellation campaigns for daring to say men aren’t women. Time and again, women who have raised concerns about grooming gangs have been demonised – often by other feminists – for supposedly lending credence to a ‘far right’ narrative. Campaign group End Violence Against Women slanders those speaking out as ‘racists co-opting feminist arguments’, while academics accuse those raising concerns of ‘fuelling hate’ and being ‘complicit in campaigning that helps stigmatise Muslim men’.

In their desperation to sustain the ideology of multiculturalism, these feminist campaigners have not just drawn a veil of silence over the abuse experienced by vulnerable girls, they have also disparaged those who have sought to stop the gangs.

Sadly, we can only imagine how life might have been different if mainstream feminists had shown an interest in the lives of working-class girls. We can only speculate how many girls might not have been raped if there had been hundreds of thousands of tweets demanding justice. We can only dream about how life might have turned out for girls growing up in care if ‘progressive’, elite feminists had supported rather than demonised the likes of Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion. The grooming-gang scandal is a stain on modern feminism.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. She is a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary.