Writing from North America, it is difficult to know how widely in Europe the proportions of the so-called grooming gangs scandal of Britain have been reported. There are in the United Kingdom approximately 17,000 cases of sexual exploitation reported each year but only about 700 that are deemed to be in the so-called category of “complex and organised child abuse”. This tends to focus on girls who are in the care of local authorities and victims have ranged in age from 12 to 18. Media inquiries and governmental and royal commission special investigations have criticised each other for being unacceptably reluctant to make serious estimates of the proportions of these problems and to identify them directly with minority groups.
The indisputable fact is that over the past 30 years, scores of thousands of vulnerable young girls have been molested and raped, effectively kidnapped and otherwise abused, and inadequate attention has been given to this horrible scandal. Fear of embarrassment and the stigma of young girls having been so mistreated has stifled some complaints, but the police and municipal authorities especially are frequently intimidated into inaction and silence by representatives of the Islamic communities and especially those of Pakistani descent. Despite all this shilly-shallying, the fact that there have been scores of thousands of such victims since the late 1990s has emerged and horrified the British public and highlighted some of the most unsalubrious and until recently, grievously underestimated implications of this problem.
In December 2017, a think tank that is generally regarded as somewhat anti-Islamist, Quilliam, reported that 84 per cent of offenders in these cases were South Asians which, though it includes India and Sri Lanka, in fact essentially meant Pakistani. Its conclusions rested on 58 cases and 264 convictions between 2005 and 2017, and were later disputed as methodologically unsound. The extensive defensive apparatus in official and professional circles that toils with fervour and ingenuity to protect ethnic minorities, (other than white-skinned ones and especially Jews), from embarrassment, almost irrespective of the facts, replied through the Home Office in December 2020. It claimed to lack the evidence necessary to draw conclusions about the ethnicity of offenders. That inquiry went so far as to imply that the percentage of offences in each group including whites probably conformed more or less to their percentage of the UK population as a whole.
An investigation conducted by The Times, using freedom of information requests, in 2021 claimed that the South Yorkshire Police did not record the ethnicity of suspects or accused persons in child sex abuse cases. In the city of Rotherham, northern England, police did not record the ethnic affiliation of alleged offenders in two-thirds of the cases.
The National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, published in June 2025, claimed that there was insufficient data to come to any conclusions at national level about the ethnic identity of perpetrators, though the subject warranted “closer examination”. It nonetheless found Asian men over-represented among suspects in three local police areas, and recorded that nearly two-thirds of the 323 suspects identified by the National Crime Agency’s Rotherham investigation were of Pakistani heritage.
This absurd and platitudinous observation from a government-backed and well-funded inquiry highlighted the fact that in addition to a pandemic of horrible abuse and exploitation of minors for depraved sexual reasons and on an apparently highly profitable basis, there is a further and in some respects even more disquieting problem of official fear, verging on cold terror, and afflicting not only local governments but the government of the United Kingdom, to lay bare the nature and proportions of this problem and equip and motivate the country to impose the measures necessary to resolve and terminate it. Inquiries mushroomed throughout the country. Gradually and very sluggishly, the proportions of the supplementary problem which allowed despicable and psychotic criminal organisations to masquerade behind ethnic sensibilities, was unmasked. In April 2023, then-prime minister Rishi Sunak, of Indian descent, acknowledged that political correctness had protected the guilty and he established a task force on this specific issue.
The later inquiries completely contradicted the whitewashing political correctness of the earlier ones. But the slow emergence of this fact has been fought tooth and nail by those fronting, deliberately or otherwise for these exploitive criminal gangs, and has caused the national response to this shocking moral outrage to be unconscionably delayed. In the more than 20-year tug-of-war between those concerned about the rape and traumatisation of thousands of children each year, and those preoccupied with the pristinity of the collective public relations of large ethnic groups such as the Pakistanis in Britain, very little was done to attack the problem at its source.
There is reasonable hope at last that the British people and their governments at all levels will finally get to grips with this nightmare. But it is all of a piece with public policy that does almost nothing to deter illegal immigration by unskilled and almost unassimilable foreigners while making no provision for improved housing or job creation to accommodate them, and then denounces and prosecutes British citizens of modest means who object to the resulting financial pressures they face with false charges of racism. The Britain of Palmerston’s Don Pacifico Affair and Gladstone’s Midlothian Campaign against atrocities committed against Bulgaria, and Winston Churchill’s sponsorship of the horribly tormented Jews have all been subsumed into a morass of spineless appeasement of society’s most vile and vicious elements.
It is little wonder that Britain is so morally debased it has been reduced to revolving-door government more odious though not quite as absurd as Fourth Republic France. There is no de Gaulle in sight.
