“Muslim Grooming Gangs” – An old conspiracy brought into the mainstream by politicians and the press today – Byline Times

The story of the “Muslim grooming gangs” entered the mainstream in 2011 when The times published an expose about a “conspiracy of silence against British sex gangs.” Experts said the story contained the two key points that became central to the narrative: that men of Pakistani descent were abusing white British girls and that the authorities failed to intervene for fear of being branded racist.

In the years that followed, thousands of articles about “grooming gangs” were published by The times and other newspapers – supported by the support of established politicians.

A “study” by the controversial Quilliam Foundation also allegedly provided scientific support for the issue. The now-defunct group, once led by conspiracy theorist Maajid Nawaz, claimed to have found that “84% of grooming gang perpetrators are Asian.” The work was dismissed by academics as “sloppy pseudoscience” because it did not use complete data in its analysis.

In the narrative of groups like Quilliam, perpetrators of Muslim origin who sexually exploit children commit these crimes because of problematic beliefs in their culture and faith (while perpetrators of white British backgrounds are individual deviants).

EXCLUSIVE

Andrew Kersley spent five months speaking to survivors of child sexual exploitation and experts on the “predation” of vulnerable women by far-right groups to understand why it happens.

Andrew Kersley

More broadly, police failures in cases involving Muslim abusers are due to political correctness (while failures in dealing with historical sexual abuse by people like Jimmy Savile, for example, are of a different nature).

In 2020, the Home Office concluded in a two-year study of crime data and academic research that “group-based offenders are most commonly white” and that there was no credible evidence that any particular ethnic group was over-represented among perpetrators of child sexual exploitation.

Despite this evidence, politicians continue to discuss “Muslim grooming gangs”. A prominent example is former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who repeatedly and baselessly claimed that South Asian Muslims made up a significant proportion of the paedophile rings operating in the UK.

In September last year, the press regulator IPSO informed the Post on Sunday to amend a comment in which she had claimed that “almost all” child sex trafficking gangs were of British-Pakistani origin.

When Byline Times When asked by the Home Office what the impact of Braverman’s comments would be, a spokeswoman replied that “child abusers can come from all walks of life” and stressed that her allegations only related to the specific cases in Rotherham, Telford and Rochdale.

But Nazir Afzal, the former head of the child sexual abuse department at the public prosecutor’s office, is convinced that Braverman’s intervention in the matter had a significant impact.

“The extreme right has gained ground through Braverman and others like her,” he said Byline Times“When ministers and the former Home Secretary talk about this issue being a ‘dividing line’ in our communities, it encourages those who are already exploiting it to continue.”

Dr Ella Cockbain, a professor at University College London who specialises in research into human trafficking and child sexual abuse, agrees. She said there was “growing evidence” that the far right was targeting survivors of child sexual exploitation and their families to exploit their trauma for their own ends.

“The deliberate spread of racist stereotypes around child sexual abuse has been a gift to the far right and has helped bring previously fringe positions into the mainstream and normalize them,” she said. Byline Times.

EXCLUSIVE

Part Two: The interconnectedness of far-right groups reflects the extent to which those with extreme beliefs exploit the issue of child sexual exploitation for their own ends.

Andrew Kersley

When right-wing extremist terrorist Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, the words “for Rotherham” were painted on his weapon.

81-year-old grandfather Mushin Ahmed was murdered in Rotherham on his way to pray at a mosque. The attack was racially motivated and apparently a response to the child sexual exploitation scandal in the city in 2015.

Darren Osborne, who killed one person and injured nine others when he drove his van into a crowd outside London’s Finsbury Park mosque, described a film about the Rochdale scandal as his “trigger”. He vowed to “kill all Muslims” before carrying out his attack.

An old stylistic device

Inaccurate stories that members of certain ethnic groups are more likely to rape white girls reflect a long-standing stereotype used by the far right disguised as a “call to arms.”

The high-profile street sexual harassment scandals of recent years and the subsequent investigations into why such abuses took so long to uncover by authorities – including claims about concerns about “political correctness” – have led to these abuses taking their modern form through concrete examples of perpetrators of color and injustice.

“The far right has long sought to capitalise on the problem of sexual instigation by street gangs,” said Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate Byline Times.

“In 2004, the British National Party (BNP) won several seats on Bradford City Council by exploiting local anger following revelations that up to 65 girls had been abused in Keighley.

“The following year, BNP leader Nick Griffin made the issue the focus of his campaign for the parliamentary seat of Keighley. Thankfully, he failed miserably, largely because Hope Not Hate was able to gain the support of the woman who led the campaign for stronger survivor protection laws.

“In a tabloid newspaper piece called Hope not Hate, distributed to all 35,000 homes in the constituency, she explained how Griffin and the BNP were exploiting her daughter’s story for their racist ends, but offering no practical solutions to the problem. Her intervention made all the difference, and Griffin came a distant third in the election with just 9% of the vote.

“Over the next 15 years, we have seen the English Defence League, Britain First and other far-right groups attempt to exploit the issue with repeated demonstrations and protests in towns such as Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford. They use the issue to stoke racism, ignoring the needs and wishes of the young women who were abused.

“However, they have forced the police and authorities to spend millions to ensure that the protests are peaceful, diverting money and resources from services that would actually help victims of abuse.”

EXCLUSIVE

Part four: The far right can present itself as filling the gap created by the lack of services with its own offer of “support” for survivors

Andrew Kersley

Any crime of sexual exploitation of children is horrific, and it is a fact that there are paedophiles with a Muslim background who commit abuse. But to focus on the issue only as The “Muslim” themea significant number of cases – attributable to non-Muslim abusers – are inadequately recognised as symptoms of a much larger national crisis.

While this investigation has revealed that a new, better organised far right is putting victims of child sexual exploitation at risk, the reality is that more and more victims are choosing to join such groups.

To understand why, experts say, we as a society need to address our ongoing unwillingness to acknowledge the complexity and scale of child sexual abuse in the UK, and the lack of support available to help those who have experienced particularly traumatic experiences to come to terms with their past.