The forgotten victims of Britain’s grooming gangs

Public anger over Britain’s historic grooming-gangs scandal is continuing to grow. There is understandable outrage at the gross mismanagement by authorities of the industrial-scale rape of white working-class girls at the hands of predominantly Pakistani-Muslim men. In towns such as Rotherham, in South Yorkshire, thousands of girls were systematically raped, trafficked and intimidated into silence by men of mostly Pakistani origin. Some victims were as young as 11. In Telford, Shropshire, a 2022 inquiry found that thousands of girls had been abused by these despicable gangs. To make matters worse, their cases were not properly investigated due to nervousness over racial sensitivities.

It’s good that this scandal is getting the publicity it deserves, with people like Elon Musk bringing global attention to it. Yet there are many more cases that have been largely forgotten, and are still being ignored, largely because they don’t fit into the current narrative of Asian men exploiting white working-class girls.

Undoubtedly, white girls make up the vast majority of victims, but ethnic-minority girls have also been targeted for abuse by grooming gangs. Back in 2013, six men from Leicester were jailed in a ‘child prostitution’ trial. The victim was a vulnerable 16-year-old girl belonging to a Sikh family. The court heard that she had been treated as a ‘sexual commodity’ at various locations across the city. Four of the six convicted had Muslim-sounding names, such as Aabidali Mubarak Ali and Wajid Usman. But a couple of those jailed – including Bharat Modhwadia and Chandresh Mistry – had names which suggest a Hindu background. This appears to have been a case of abuse by Muslims and Hindus on a vulnerable Sikh girl – in a city, Leicester, that has all too often been presented as a shining beacon of diversity in modern Britain. A report cited in the House of Commons suggests that there have been numerous Sikh victims.

Cases of child sex abuse within minority communities have been largely overlooked, too. In 2013, the Muslim Women’s Network UK (MWNUK) produced a report called ‘Unheard Voices’, which gathered evidence into sexual violence carried out by gangs of South Asian Muslim men, preying upon girls from their own communities. Based on 35 case studies, the majority of incidents involved female victims ‘being passed around and prostituted among many other men, whether they were friends or loosely connected associates within a group or network’.

The report also noted the cultural barriers that prevented victims from sharing their abuse with others and reporting crimes to the authorities – namely, notions such as family honour and community shame. In some cases, families even made the decision to hide the abuse because they believed it would harm the future marital prospects of their daughters. Perpetrators relied on these cultural honour codes to silence, control, exploit and intimidate their victims.

Also in 2013, an investigation by the Daily Mirror found that South Asian Muslim grooming gangs had long been targeting vulnerable women in their own communities. In an especially harrowing case, three British Pakistani sisters were left open to opportunistic gangs after the death of their father, the only man in the family. One of the women, named Safia, told the Mirror how she watched her two older sisters become involved with a group of violent, abusive men. When the eldest sister left the family home, Safia and her mother tried to report the abuse she was suffering. But police believed that the eldest sister was simply fleeing a marriage forced on her by her family and did not investigate.

It is misconceptions like these that have allowed grooming gangs to operate with near impunity for so long. The refusal to interrogate the belief that all diversity is good, and that multiculturalism must be celebrated at all costs, has led to a scenario in which the authorities have abandoned women and girls of all races, religions and ethnicities to abuse. If we want justice for all grooming-gang victims in Britain, then we must understand the complex dynamics at play. It is vital to recognise that they belong to a diversity of ethnic and religious communities.

In future, we must look at the entire picture when it comes to gangs of men sexually exploiting vulnerable girls. No stone can be left unturned.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.