The twin scandals of the existence of child rape gangs and elite contempt for white working-class girls go back over decades. Organised gangs of mostly Pakistani Muslims brutalised vulnerable young girls on an industrial scale in British towns since the 1970s. The horror finally broke through into public consciousness with an Elon Musk tweet in January that garnered 70 million views. Because the problem was heavily concentrated in towns under Labour-dominated councils, the Starmer government obstinately blocked calls for a national inquiry, accusing those demanding an inquiry of jumping aboard the ‘bandwagon of the far-right’, ‘grabbing a cheap headline and political opportunism’ and indulging in dog whistles. Faced with growing outrage at the perception of running a protection racket for pedophile rapists, torturers and enablers, Starmer kicked the can down the road by commissioning Baroness Casey to ‘audit’ the scandal. Her report last month concluded that, ‘Instead of examining whether there is disproportionality in ethnicity or cultural factors at play in certain types of offending, we found many examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems.’

Casey admitted to having changed her mind on the need for an inquiry faced with ‘resolute denial’ of the ‘scale and scope’ of child sexual exploitation that’s detailed in the report. In one of many U-turns, Starmer agreed to a national inquiry but, based on past pronouncements, scepticism is warranted on the strength of his commitment. Casey’s recommendations include a national police operation to review cases of child exploitation on which no action had been taken, changing the law so that adults who have sex with a child are automatically charged with rape, mandatory collection of data on ethnicity and nationality in sexual offences against children, research into the social drivers of group-based child sexual exploitation, treating these cases like serious and organised crime, and more stringent regulation of the taxi industry. One issue she didn’t address because it was beyond her terms of reference is the government’s obsession on an official definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that would criminalise public discussions of problems like the rape gangs because this could humiliate, marginalise and stigmatise Muslims.

In 2018, Kish Bhatti-Sinclair and Charles Sutcliffe offered an impressively robust yet nuanced analysis of the demographics of those prosecuted for group localised child sexual exploitation crimes using a database of 498 defendants in 73 prosecutions from 1997 to 2017. They first determined the heritage of the defendants. Then, using census data from 404 local authorities, they calculated the relationship between child sex prosecutions and the religion and ethnic heritage of each local population. From this two-pronged research they concluded that Pakistani-heritage Muslim males dominated the prosecutions. As per the 2011 census, 38 per cent of the three million Bangladeshis, Indians and Pakistanis in England and Wales were of Pakistani heritage. Pakistanis, 91 per cent of whom were Muslim, made up 38 per cent of the total of 2.7 million Muslims. Thus while almost all Pakistanis are Muslim, most Muslims and Asians are not Pakistani. Other significant Muslim populations were of Bangladeshi, Indian, other Asian, and Arab ancestry. In 17 trials in 13 towns between 1997 and 2011, 50 of 56 people convicted were of Pakistani heritage, three were from Bangladesh and India and three were white.

Overall, 83 per cent of those charged with group child sexual offences were Muslim. Relative to their presence in the local populations, Pakistani males were over-represented, Hindus were under-represented, and Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jews and Buddhists were in line with population shares. Pakistani heritage was more closely linked with prosecutions than Muslim identity. This makes it all the more disappointing that Baroness Casey fell into the trap of conflating predominantly Pakistani Muslim perpetrators, with voluminous evidence in her own report to this effect, with Asians of many faiths. There is one other surprising statistic in the analysis. Between 60 to 70 per cent of UK Pakistanis were from just one city: Mirpur in Pakistani Kashmir. This led the authors to speculate on the importance of the mores binding the biradari (extended kinship group) as an explanatory variable. According to the court evidence, the perpetrators ‘appear to take little legal or moral responsibility for underage sex, demonstrate contempt for the judicial process, express feelings of entitlement, minimally conceal their crimes and often plead not guilty’.

The ‘worst race-hate crime of modern Britain’ (Guy Dampier in the UK Telegraph) fused with the soft bigotry of low expectations regarding civic virtue in migrant communities (that is, wrong type of perpetrator) and also with Britain’s traditional class divide that turned a blind eye to the plight of working-class girls (wrong type of victim). For some strange reason, this particular intersectionality does not excite the social justice warriors. The silence of the progressive professional feminists should haunt them for the rest of their lives but of course won’t, for they wear the invincible cloak of self-regarding moral virtue, of the kind that obsesses over ‘intrusive staring’ as ‘sexual harassment’. According to the Bhatti-Sinclair and Sutcliffe study, the pattern of predatory behaviour was also shaped by the accessibility of victims who were typically young (often prepubescent) white girls in state care, homeless, from unstable homes or under little parental supervision. This meant they were often on the streets and came into frequent contact with Pakistani Muslim males in night-time public-facing jobs like taxi drivers and workers in takeaways and restaurants. The perpetrators were culturally conditioned to view the girls’ behaviour as promiscuous and ‘available’. What this highlights is the importance of collecting accurate, authoritative data on age, sex, occupation, religion and ethnicity of offenders in order to develop effective policy for tackling the scourge of mass child rapes.

Casey noted that ‘a significant proportion’ of ‘live cases’ of child-sex offences ‘appear to involve suspects who are’ non-nationals or asylum claimants. According to the 2024 crime league table, foreigners are 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for sex offences than British suspects in the UK and 48 nationalities have a higher arrest rate than Britons. In London, foreigners comprise 67 per cent of arrests for sex offences. Opacity, even if rooted in the desire to promote social cohesion and avoid inflaming community tensions, does a grave disservice both to victims and to the majority of immigrant communities from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Is it unreasonable and racist, or prudent and sensible, to limit immigration from countries that export the worst sex offenders? Yet last month, in another example of Western civilisation’s death by slow suicide, two Rochdale grooming gang leaders could not be deported because, having renounced their Pakistan citizenship and destroyed their passports, they would become stateless.

Although some courageous voices refused to be intimidated and shamed into silence, the girls were betrayed by the cluster of civic institutions and clutch of public officials who violated their legal duty and oath of office.

The politicians, civil servants and police must face a reckoning and pay a commensurate price to appease our innate sense of justice, bring closure to victims and deter future neglect of official duty of care.