On ‘Grooming’ (Read: Rape) Gangs

In recent days ‘grooming gangs’ have shot up the political agenda, in large part because Elon Musk has begun spreading the word on X/Twitter. It’s a strangely euphemistic term, used to refer to what one columnist more accurately describes as ‘the industrial-scale rape of poor and working-class girls…covered up because the authorities were terrified of being called racist’.

Precise statistics about the perpetrators are hard to come by (which in itself says a lot) but in many high-profile cases the men involved were predominantly of Pakistani-Muslim heritage.

The phenomenon serves as a searing indictment of liberal groupthink. It demonstrates in the starkest of terms how bad things can get when people prioritise adherence to ideological dogma over dealing with social reality in all its complexity. And it raises questions about a range of topics – Islam, mass immigration, multiculturalism, women’s rights, etc – that simply cannot be satisfactorily answered by chanting the sort of leftist mantras we’ve been forced to listen to nonstop for over a decade.

Some of the facts that have emerged online are unimaginably grim. Indeed, such is the depth of the depravity it’s hard to know where to start.

A 16-year-old, pregnant with the baby she had conceived with her abuser while underage, was burned to death along with her mother and disabled sister. A 14-year-old disappeared into thin air, and is suspected to have been murdered. A 12-year-old wandered around for 24 hours being repeatedly gang raped, seemingly at random, by almost everyone she encountered (see below). Children as young as 11 were raped by numerous men, one after another. The exact number of victims is unknown but is estimated to be in the several thousands.

In many instances the authorities knew that these bands of paedophiles were operating – they knew that kids were being plied with alcohol, drugged and violated, often in the most unimaginably brutal ways. But on far too many occasions they seemingly failed to act.

Those with the power to do something about it deliberately didn’t tell parents in case it upset ‘community relations’. Politicians said as little as possible, and instead spent their time stymying and opposing enquiries into the gangs (they’re still doing this, by the way). Media outlets obfuscated and deflected. ‘Academics’ and commentators accused the people who were discussing the issue honestly of being ‘islamophobic’, and devoted their energy to gaslighting the world by doing things like changing the title of the Wikipedia entry on the topic to ‘Grooming Gang Moral Panic’.

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