Grooming gangs: the #MeToo of the 2020s?

That it took a hysterical intervention from Elon Musk to make the politicians act is a national disgrace.

Musk not mincing words

I’ve avoided writing about the biggest story of 2025 so far, the grooming gangs scandal, because, well, I wasn’t sure it was really a story. I mean, the grooming, trafficking, and rape of young white girls by gangs of mainly Pakistani men in certain northern towns in England isn’t exactly news. Newspapers have been publishing reports on it ever since the investigative reporter, Andrew Norfolk, first broke the story in The Times in 2011 and won an Orwell Prize for his work.

Many official reports and prosecutions followed in Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, and Oldham. Dozens of men were jailed and still are being jailed. In the past 12 months alone, the Grooming Gangs Task Force, set up by Rishi Sunak, has arrested 550 suspects and identified 4,000 victims. It’s not as if nothing has been done.

Why should we dance to the tune of the overwrought owner of Twitter just because he’s discovered decade-old rape trial transcripts and started accusing the Prime Minister of being “complicit in the rape of Britain”? In fact, when Keir Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions in 2013, he was instrumental in ensuring that the gangs in Rochdale and elsewhere were brought to justice—as Andrew Norfolk has said himself.

However, I don’t believe we can leave things there—as if the grooming gang story is now only for the history books. It is not over by any means. Gangs, by no means all of them Pakistani, are still abusing underage girls with impunity in many English towns and cities. This is partly because there has been, if not a cover-up, certainly a historic reluctance by British society to face up to the magnitude of what has been described as "the biggest child protection scandal in UK history.” We have yet to hear the testimony of the many, many victims. There has not, to use the current idiom, been “closure” on what should be called the rape gang affair.

Looking back, it is clear there has been both conscious and unconscious neglect of the organised abuse of vulnerable girls by all ethnicities, including many white men. This has been conceded by the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, only this week. This is largely because of institutional neuralgia about multiculturalism and the mainstream media’s terror of appearing to be on the side of the Far Right.