The small-boats grooming gang

Seven Afghan men – five of whom entered the UK on a small boat – have been charged with 40 offences after an investigation into a grooming gang in Norwich. Of the remaining two, one came to the UK concealed on a lorry and another arrived through ‘a port’, according to the BBC. All arrived illegally, none speaks English and all are classified as ‘refugees’. The charges relate to two girls, aged in their early to mid-teens at the time of the alleged offences, which police say occurred between August 2023 and May 2025.

The UK’s illegal-migration crisis is now very much a public-safety emergency. Norwich is a place with a rich history and is traditionally one of the better English cities to live in. The latest charges show that there are few places in England now insulated from the sexual criminality which has become an undeniable feature of mass illegal immigration.

The news from Norwich might leave us shocked, but not surprised. Few will also be surprised by the perpetrators’ background. While it is important to guard against sweeping generalisations of entire nationalities, and worth recognising that Afghanistan is a diverse country, attitudes to women there are uniformly terrible. According to the Georgetown Institute’s Women, Peace and Security index, Afghanistan is the worst nation on Earth for women’s wellbeing.

There are many factors behind this aggressive misogyny. The clan cultures that dominate Afghan life are very much male-dominated, while the Taliban imposes the crudest interpretation of Islam. In any event, no country could be more alien to the Western way of life than Afghanistan.

It is time to be brutally honest. Illegal migration, particularly in the form of the ongoing small-boats crisis, poses a fundamental threat to the safety of women and girls in the UK. It is not racist or xenophobic to suggest that certain cultures are inferior when it comes to the treatment, protection, and rights of women and girls. Nor should it be controversial to point out that importing young men from these cultures undermines female public safety. The UK has more than enough problems with grooming-gang perpetrators from unintegrated communities – predominantly Pakistani Muslims who remain attached to tribal ‘brotherhood’ networks – activity which has taken place over decades in towns like Rotherham and Telford.

By failing to get to grips with illegal migration, the political establishment is failing women and girls. Enough is enough.

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