Michael Murphy: Britain’s mass child rape horror and the price of not being called racist

Thanks to Elon Musk, the grooming gangs scandal is finally getting the outrage it deserves

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Michael Murphy , Special to National Post

Published Jan 09, 2025  • 

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For years, the British establishment ignored the mass rape of thousands of English girls by predominantly Pakistani-Muslim men — a crime it still refuses to confront. Embarrassment over the ethnic profile of both abusers and victims enabled networks of rapists, known as “grooming gangs,” to prey on vulnerable children with impunity. Driven partly by racial and religious contempt for their mostly white victims, these men exploited girls across northern and central England in an atrocity without parallel in modern British history. It continues to this day.

How did this happen? Or more precisely, how could it have been tolerated? Much like the Catholic Church abuse scandals, this crime threatened a cherished dogma. Multiculturalism preached that diversity was “our strength.” When uncomfortable truths surfaced, they were quietly brushed aside.

The illusion came at a cost. Whistleblowers were smeared as bigots, and victims dismissed by the very people meant to protect them. In case after case, town after town, police and local officials were more concerned with avoiding accusations of racism and preserving “community cohesion” than preventing the rape of children. And with few exceptions, journalists averted their eyes from one of the gravest injustices of our time.

That changed last week, when the grotesque details of one case, involving the mass rape of a 12-year-old girl, reached Elon Musk, who amplified it to his 200 million followers on X. This shattered what writer Ben Sixsmith called a decades-long “conspiracy of murmuring” and triggered an international outcry — one, at last, commensurate with the scale of the horror.

Instead of channelling the public outrage — the obvious response given the severity of the crimes — the British Prime Minister sparred with Musk over alleged “lies” and “misinformation.” In doing so, he missed the point entirely. Musk’s interventions, calling for members of the government to be jailed, were clumsy at times, but pale in comparison to the horror at hand. It is precisely this kind of deflection that allowed the abuse to persist, unchecked, for decades. While British politicians agonized over linguistic etiquette, a nationwide epidemic of child rape was ignored — and enabled — by those in power.

As a result, Britain is well-versed in the dangers of “far-Right” boogeymen and the speech crimes of anti-Islam activists like Tommy Robinson, yet no one knows precisely how many girls have been molested. There has never been a national inquiry focusing solely on grooming gangs. Local investigations offer only fragments — glimpses of a vast, grim collage of abuse, obscured by wilful indifference.

An inquiry into Telford (2022) found that more than 1,000 girls were abused, with cases dating back to the 1980s. In Rotherham, a South Yorkshire town now synonymous with gang rape, more than 1,400 girls were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013. Yet Telford and Rotherham are only two of more than 50 towns and cities where such gangs are known to have operated. In 2023 alone, police in England and Wales recorded over 7,000 sexual grooming offences, indicating the abuse is widespread and ongoing.

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Without a comprehensive inquiry, we can only guess at the total number of victims. Speaking in the House of Lords in 2018, Lord Pearson suggested, based on available data and the often repeated daily abuse inflicted on victims, that in total “millions of rapes of white and Sikh girls by Muslim men” may have occurred.

But even such potentially staggering figures remain an abstraction, incapable of fully capturing the horror. Consider the case of Samantha (in some reports, she is named Sophie), a 12-year-old girl abducted in 2006 by “two Asian men” in Oldham. They drove her around for hours, repeatedly assaulted her, then threw her from a moving car. Desperate and injured, she sought help from a passerby — who also abused her. She fled again, only to be picked up by another man she trusted to take her to the police. Instead, he took her to a house, where she was raped by five more “Asian men.” Her ordeal lasted nearly 24 hours. In total, eight men assaulted Samantha that day. In her world, every adult was a predator. The ringleader of the final gang, Shakil Chowdhury was jailed for only three years.

Such stories are not aberrations. One girl, enslaved at the age of 12, was branded with the initial “M” on her buttock by her rapist, Mohammed, to mark her as his property. Another 14-year-old was abducted, raped, and allegedly dismembered, with her body disposed of at a kebab shop.

The victims, mocked as “white slags,” were considered easy prey by their abusers. At a 2012 sentencing for Rochdale perpetrators, the judge noted that the girls were treated as “worthless and beyond respect” because “they were not of your community or religion.”

According to a study published by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), the vast majority of those prosecuted for grooming gang crimes in the UK between 1997 and 2017 were of Pakistani-Muslim backgrounds — a fact frequently downplayed by the media.

In Rotherham, a 2020 academic study found that one in 73 Muslim men in the town had been prosecuted for involvement in grooming gangs. How many remain undetected because authorities are looking the other way in Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, and beyond? Without a national inquiry, we may never know.

In a speech that could define his premiership, Starmer dismissed calls for an inquiry as pandering to a “far-Right bandwagon” — a slur on the British public’s legitimate concerns, one he may come to regret.

Such declarations reflect a deeply ingrained mindset: unpalatable truths involving minority groups are considered too dangerous to share with the public. It is this attitude that allowed grooming gangs to thrive unchecked for so long. Authorities were petrified of a backlash against the “Asian community” from the white majority. In Manchester, a 2019 report concluded that Asian grooming gangs were left to roam the streets partly because officers were instructed to seek out offenders of other ethnicities.

Similarly, the 2022 Telford review found, “there was a nervousness about race … bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community.” The report found that the town council suspended taxi licensing enforcement, even though it had become “aware of taxi drivers offering children free rides in return for sexual activity.” The decision to stop enforcement, the report concluded, “was borne entirely out of fear of accusations of racism.”

To understand the power of a belief, consider what people are willing to sacrifice for it. In Britain, the sanctity of children, their innocence, and the integrity of our institutions were all heaped onto the pyre of a multicultural ideal — one that promised harmony but delivered a betrayal too vast and too painful to yet comprehend.

Michael Murphy is a journalist based in London. He writes for the Daily Telegraph and presented the documentary ‘Ireland is full! Anti-immigration backlash in Ireland’. You can follow him on X: @michaelmurph_y.