This is a guest post by Abdullah Noorudeen from Coolness of Hind.

In an age where right-wing, often racially-charged rhetoric is algorithmically amplified by Elon Musk’s vision of Zionist-inflected, right-wing free speech, the “grooming gangs” demonisation, which seeks to tie sexual crimes to Islam and “Pakistani culture”, has gained further traction over the past few weeks.

In light of this toxic climate, it is necessary to address the dominant narratives surrounding this issue, especially given the deadly consequences that such rhetoric has had in the past.

Statistics: Ignoring the 85%

This manufactured outrage has successfully pressured official responses, with Labour MPs Sarah Champion, Paul Waugh, and Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham all supporting calls for a “local” inquiry. Kemi Badenoch, herself groomed by neocons like Douglas Murray no doubt, went further in dog whistling the dehumanisation of Pakistani Muslims, claiming that “peasants” from “sub-communities” were the ones engaged in grooming and rape gangs.

All of this pressure has resulted in British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announcing a national review into “grooming gangs”. Shockingly, the Home Office ‘X’ account used the demogogic racialised terminology of the Zionist far-right movement and media, declaring, “We’re cracking down on grooming gangs.”  It is worth recalling that when the Home Office published its report on this issue, it used “group-based child sexual exploitation” instead of “grooming gangs”. As if this is not enough, Cooper has appointed Louise Casey to lead the national audit. We will explore the implications of this appointment more fully in the next part, but suffice to say, the neocons will be having a field day in their demonisation of Islam and Muslims.

Of course, it makes little difference that according to the latest statistics, 3.9% of group-based child abusers were of Pakistani origin. Given the rhetoric from neocon Zionist-right-wing media accounts as well as politicians like Badenoch and Robert Jenrick (who did very little on the issue when he was a minister in the Home Office), you wouldn’t know that 85% percent of group-based child sex abusers were white.

The propaganda manufactured as a result is that white people don’t groom. Only Pakistani Muslims do.

At this point, the Zionist-neocon commentators employ spin to effectively claim that grooming gangs are intrinsic to Pakistanis and their culture.

RELATED: Douglas Murray, Neoconservativism, and the Culture of Child Sexual Abuse

“Pakistanis Are Overrepresented”

The first spin tactic is to labour the point that Pakistanis are overrepresented when it comes to “grooming”. This has been debunked by 2022–23 statistics published by the Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse, which shows Pakistanis are proportionate to their population, whilst whites are overrepresented by 5 percent.

According to the November 2024 Group-Based Offending Publication published by the Hydrant Programme, whites were proportionate to the population, whilst Asians were underrepresented by 2 percent.

In its coverage of the 2024 dataset released this year, the Telegraph splashed the inflammatory headline claiming that Pakistanis were “four times more likely to be behind grooming”. This was based on a claim that 13.7 per cent of child sexual exploitation “grooming” offences in the first nine months of last year involved Pakistanis.

However, the article conveniently overlooks a key point: this figure is only possible when data concerning “grooming” within institutional settings – such as sports groups, schools, and church-based organisations, as well as abuse occurring within family structures – is excised.

Moreover, the dataset itself is far from comprehensive.

Nestled within the article is another seemingly innocuous detail: the data accounts for only a third of the suspects, as ethnic backgrounds are only recorded after police interviews. This introduces the possibility of statistical bias – after all, some groups may disclose their ethnicity whilst others may be more inclined to remain silent. Consequently, Richard Fewkes, director of the Hydrant Programme, cautioned against drawing definitive conclusions, highlighting the complexity of the issue. He noted various factors, including the easier identification of perpetrators as Pakistanis and the “statistical sampling quirk” that skews the data.

Quite simply, if the data sampling is this bad (a third of the suspects from 9 months of data), any claim of statistical significance becomes virtually meaningless. To sensationalise that Pakistanis are “four times likely than whites to be behind grooming” is nothing short of statistical swindling, a deliberate distortion designed to demonise.

One can easily follow this line of reasoning to conclude a Pakistani man involved in sports, the Church, or in a family is statistically less likely to be implicated in child sexual offences than their British-white counterparts. In other words, whites are more likely to sexually abuse children in the Church, schools, sports institutions, and within families. The very same logic that is wielded to stigmatise a minority group could just as easily be applied to highlight the prevalence of abuse amongst whites.

Bad data aside, the over-/underrepresentation discussion overlooks a more plausible explanation: that people in less governed or accountable settings (such as Churches, sports institutions, and late-night taxiing) will exploit those who are vulnerable in those same settings.

RELATED: Debunking Elon Musk’s Grooming Gangs Hoax

“Cover-Up” Due to “Racial Sensitivities” and the Call for a New Inquiry

The second tactic used is the claim of a “cover-up” regarding the scale of “grooming gangs” due to racial sensitivities. This “passing-the-buck” argument is particularly asinine. It narrows and reframes the discussion from the core issue of official negligence (failure to act on the knowledge of offences being committed) to ethnicity as an underlying cause (“we didn’t want to appear racist”). In other words, not only is the crime due to Pakistani culture, but Pakistanis are also the reason public services fail in their duties. Thus, the victims, to varying degrees, are perceptively – and conveniently – almost always white.

Given the wall-to-wall coverage of the issue in the years following David Cameron’s announcement of his muscular liberalism in 2011, which has associated “grooming gangs” with Pakistanis in the public consciousness, this cover-up certainly hasn’t dulled the demonisation of Pakistani Muslims at the state and media level.

One recent Telegraph article on cover-ups points to officials having to “bury” the “grooming gangs” story for the “good of community relations”.

Except, the 2014 Alexis Jay report, which the article positively cites, concluded that there was “no evidence of children’s social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators when dealing with individual child protection cases, including CSE”. In terms of the police, it concluded that “ethnic issues did not influence professional decision-making in individual cases… Frontline staff did not report personal experience of attempts to influence their practice or decision making because of ethnic issues.”

(NOTE: the claim that over 1400 white girls were abused by a majority of Asians between 1997 and 2013 is based on the Jay report. However, this claim is based on unreliable data, dubious data sampling, and questionable extrapolations, whilst the assumption that most perpetrators in Rotherham were Asian is outright baseless. It’s a scandal that few if any have scrutinised how the “1400” number has been derived. As an example, readers can review the Jay report’s methodology on pp.30–35, here.)

According to Dr. Ella Cockbain, a few authorities did cite fears of upsetting race relations. However, she notes that this was not the “sole or even the main explanatory factor for inaction”.

Nevertheless, such reports are now available for scrutiny. In fact, it can be argued, as Dr. Ella Cockbain posits, that ethnic minorities have been over-policed.

The calls for an inquiry are also odd given that the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) published its report in 2022, and the government, under both the Conservatives and Labour, has yet to implement its 20 recommendations.

We do not have a problem with an inquiry or transparency. Those destroying 114 documents concerning an alleged Westminster child sexual abuse network have a problem with transparency. British politicians (and the Church) turning a blind eye to the Westminster-linked sexual abuse of children and actively covering up allegations for decades, have a problem with transparency.

We do have a problem with Zionist neocon-driven “national reviews” conducted by Islamophobes who will employ it as a pretext for more anti-Muslim demonisation and regulation of Muslims religious practice (more on this in our next piece).

All we ask is that the complete dataset for all institutional sex abuse, historic and current, be made public, alongside the ethnicities of the perpetrators involved. After all, we too would like to understand which groups have greater propensities to engage in child sexual abuse across various institutions.

It is likely that the data from sectors such as the Church, government, and sports would not neatly align with the racist, simplistic, and reductive “it’s the Pakis” narrative.

RELATED: New Report Alleges Systematic Child Molestation in Catholic Church

Pakistani Culture Leads to Pakistanis Abusing “White Girls” Exclusively

The common right-wing trope is that “Pakistani culture” leads to Pakistanis abusing “white girls” exclusively. The Conservative Party’s shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick was alluding to this trope when he said, “Not all cultures are equal: importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here.”

This dog-whistling reference to Muslim cultures is a sweeping generalisation and academically unsubstantiated, especially given that the 2024 data on group-based child sexual abuse showed 17 people, or 0.0019 per cent of the Pakistani-origin population were involved in the practice. It also fails to explain why some of the victims were from the ethnic minority community (see also here).

Those who advance such arguments should know that the blade cuts both ways. If one is to make a culturalist argument against Pakistani-origin perpetrators, similar sweeping generalisations can be levied against young white girls and the culture from which they emerge.

According to past reviews into group-based child sex abuse, the Pakistani perpetrators were often involved in the “night-time economy”, running takeaways or running taxies. Girls were considered to be involved in “risky lifestyles” involving drink and intoxicants. Telford (a location where a high-profile “grooming gang” case occurred), is dubbed the “teenage pregnancy capital of Europe”. If we adopt the culturalist argument, one could draw a connection between,

• British-white culture and the failure of white parents of low socio-economic backgrounds to look after their daughters, especially at night;
• the British-white culture of drinking and the girls’ consumption of alcohol;
• the growing cultural phenomenon of British Only Fans pornographers openly competing to set world records for the most sexual encounters with men, and the amenability of impressionable young white girls to seek sexual approval from groups of men.

The imagination is the limit when it comes to drawing such cultural connections. However, these links would rightly be dismissed as tenuous and limited, with the girls’ vulnerability explained through a combination of demographic and socio-economic factors.

We’ve observed how some on social media are quick to dismiss such uncomfortable implications of their argument by insisting that there is a difference between perpetrator and victim. However, it remains unclear how this distinction justifies whether or not culture should be blamed. Are we to believe that culture should be dismissed when a white person is the victim but considered central when the perpetrator is from a minority group?

The subtle underlying assumption of this position (much like the discourse of terrorism) is that child sex abuse offences perpetrated by members of the British white population is an individual aberration, whilst Pakistani-origin Brits have a collective, deeper, culturally-rooted proclivity.

However, this assumption fails to withstand scrutiny when we consider the British white abuse of non-white children. A prime example, as we have highlighted in detail, is child sex tourism, where British-white people (and Western Europeans) travel to Eastern Europe, Asian, and African countries to sexually abuse poor, vulnerable little black and brown boys and girls and even babies. The available data indicates that there is a disproportionate level of British representation in this transnational sexual abuse of darker coloured children.

Would it be acceptable now to racialise the discussion and interrogate the British-white race and culture that “drives” such globalised depravity?

RELATED: Child “Grooming” and Sexual Abuse: A British White Export?

Concluding Remarks

We reject these broad, racially-charged generalisations. People will exploit hidden spaces and opportunities to sexually abuse the naïve and vulnerable. And different spaces occupied by different demographics will reflect in the ethnicities of perpetrators and victims.

From an Islamic perspective, the issue at its core is one of spiritual malaise, a pernicious force that preys on the vulnerable to satisfy base desires – a phenomenon that transcends cultures. A more fruitful approach would begin with an examination of the societal foundations that either exacerbate or mitigate such dynamics. Islam has a comprehensive moral philosophy and a cohesive set of laws to prevent such crimes, while ensuring perpetrators are firmly punished if any offences occur. Has the West cultivated an effective moral system that adequately protects the vulnerable and addresses these issues in a coherent manner?

This question falls outside the scope of the piece at hand. For now, the more urgent inquiry is: Why does the current British right-wing discourse, dominated by Zionist neocon ideologues, distort facts, forgo nuance, and descend into overt racism when addressing Pakistani Muslims? While it might be tempting to scrutinise the culture that nurtures this hypocritical tendency, our focus here will shift. In the next piece, we will explore a common thread driving the anti-Muslim demagoguery and the newly announced national review into “grooming gangs”.

RELATED: Prohibition of Gender Mixing: A Protective Islamic Civilisational Barrier