How Not to Talk About Rape Gangs

And why liberal conservatives may present the best way forward

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

(Audio version here)

The problem of so-called “Grooming Gangs,” more properly understood as rape gangs is currently dominating mainstream media and social media. Because the gangs in question comprise of Muslim men, mostly of Pakistani origin, this is also, at root, a heated debate about immigration. The public discourse on this subject is largely a mess involving multiple biased political narratives and impeding any productive discussion of the subject. Unhelpful combatants in this battle of narratives include unambiguous racists and ethnonationalists, Critical Social Justice activists focusing on critical theories of race and postcolonialism, Muslims evading or deflecting from the issue, feminists determined to make the problem a universal one created by men, adherents to cults of personality surrounding Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson and liberals conflicted over their principles of individualism and the need to address statistical realities. This essay is therefore rather a long one!

Public discourse on this issue has largely centred around very poor arguments based on dubious political motivations. This is a big problem because the issue of rape gangs is a very serious one that merits very serious attention. Is it best addressed by a national investigation rather than local, specific ones? I don’t know whether a zoomed out or zoomed in focus is most likely to provide information to enable addressing the problem most effectively, because this is not my area of expertise. My inclination is to ask, “Why not both?”

People are right to be both angry and worried about this and being so does not indicate racist or anti-Muslim sentiment. While the vast majority of Britons, including Muslims, abhor sexual violence especially against vulnerable girls, there are subcultures that do not abhor it. One prominent one that dehumanises women and girls and regards them as prey is to be found among Muslims of mostly Pakistani origin. Some of the victims of these gangs have been Pakistani Muslim girls and some non-Muslim South Asian girls but most of them have been white non-Muslim girls. These are men who have contempt for women and girls but particularly non-Muslims and see them as legitimate targets for sexual predation, form gangs around those beliefs and horrifically abuse the most vulnerable girls. Addressing the problem of religiously aggravated organised gang rape has been hindered by authorities' fear of being seen as racist or Islamophobic. This is unacceptable. People are right to be angry about it and demand evidence that real steps are being taken to acknowledge the problem to exist and be vigilantly pro-active to detect it, shut it down and enact harsh penalties on offenders.

We can and must acknowledge this problem to exist and doing so does not require demonising all Muslims, all Pakistanis or all brown people and acting as though no other organised rape/paedophile gangs exist run by white non-Muslim men. Such collective demonisation is not only unjust to vast numbers of Pakistani men but undermines serious attempts to bring down the predatory subculture. However, diverting attention away from the phenomenon of religiously aggravated rape gangs which exist among Muslim Pakistanis to other organised sexual abuse and paedophile rings which are not motivated by the dehumanisation of non-Muslims also undermines such efforts. Such gangs need to be understood and addressed on their own terms with regard to specific motivations. For a man to commit such horrific crimes against vulnerable girls; for him to be able to maintain an erection in the face of a child’s pain, terror and violation requires a deeply twisted and dangerous psychology. He must be a psychopath indifferent to the suffering to others, a sexual sadist excited by the suffering of others, an individual with a deep hatred of women and girls or someone who has dehumanised certain women and girls seen as belonging to a despised outgroup.

Detecting and intervening on sexual offenders operating in groups requires distinguishing these motivations and tackling them specifically. We have seen numerous cases recently in which twisted individuals with a particular dangerous fetish have been enabled to find, inspire and conspire with each other to commit crimes using dark corners of the internet. We saw this in the case of Gisele Pelicot whose husband found his fellow rapists with a fetish for raping unconscious women on a forum called “Without her knowledge,” in the case of Abdulrizak Hirsi who ran a “Chikan” forum for those with a frotteurism fetish to inspire each other to rub their exposed penises on women in crowded spaces and share their accounts of having done so, and in the case of Gavin Plumb who conspired to abduct, rape and murder the TV presenter, Holly Willoughby, on a forum called “Abduct Lovers.” In the last case, this attempt was foiled by an undercover police officer who had been infiltrating such forums. This highlights the importance of specific, targeted interventions based on a knowledge of the motivations and modes of operation of certain subsets of offenders.

In the case of rape gangs run by Muslim men who have contempt or even hatred for non-Muslim women and girls and use this as justification for horrific sexual abuse and exploitation, this is a very specific motivation and it is clearly related to Islam. Survivors of the rape gangs have reported both racial and religious abuse being used to dehumanise them. While members of all Abrahamic religions could use their faith to justify sexual slavery, in practice, most of them do not and we do not see Christian or Jewish rape gangs targeting non-Christians or non-Jews. This is a hostile subculture existing within Muslim communities among predatory men who do not need the internet to find each other, but can detect others who are willing to engage in such abuse by the language of hostility and dehumanisation towards women and girls and especially towards non-Muslims. The people most able to detect men likely to engage in organised sexual exploitation and rape are other Muslims of this community, but there has not been a significant rate of reports of such concerns from within the community. Because Muslim Brits of Pakistani origin are immigrants or the children of immigrants, this naturally leads to arguments that the solution to this kind of rape gang is to be found in immigration policy which restricts or even bans Pakistani men or all Muslim men. This is a coherent argument but it sits badly with those who oppose collective blame of whole demographics and particularly those who know and are close to ethical, compassionate Muslims who would never condone, let alone engage in such vile abuse and are assets to the country.

We do need to be able to have calm, ethical, principled, data-driven, practical conversations about how to address this particular brand of organised sexual abuse specifically without people being afraid of being falsely accused of racism or anti-Muslim bigotry. We also need to be able to have these discussions and develop solutions without it descending into genuine racism and anti-Muslim bigotry or being derailed by endless whataboutism in relation to other organised gangs of sexual predators. We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by narratives formed around cults of personality involving figures like Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson. Of particular difficulty and of most discomfort to those of us who are liberal individualists is addressing the issue without becoming tangled up in the conflict between the need to think statistically and the need not to evaluate individuals by statistics. There are certain groups who are getting in the way of this conversation.

Firstly, there are genuine racists and anti-Muslim bigots who combine their kernel of truth - that there is a dark and twisted subculture of religiously-motivated organised gang rape within Pakistani Muslim communities - with malevolent untruths about the inherent contaminating evil of brown and black people. They use the truth within their racist narrative to justify the untruths and accuse anybody objecting to the latter of denying the former and, indeed, being complicit in the former. These individuals really are far-right extremists who also typically target for abuse groups in society who, statistically, cause very few problems at all - Indians and Jews - and advocate ethnonationalism. So hateful, demonstrably false and unethical is their overall narrative that it leads misguided but well-intentioned people who oppose racism to minimise or even deny the truth about the existence of religiously-motivated rape gangs and “whatabout” the issue by pointing at data showing the majority of sexual exploiters to be white non-Muslims.

This ties into the second group who get in the way of effective action against the subculture of offenders who are Pakistani Muslims with specific religious and racial motivations for their abuse. These are not simply ethical opponents of racism who object to the demonisation of brown and black Brits but Critical Social Justice cultural relativists inspired by narratives stemming from critical theories of race and postcolonial theory. These individuals are hyperalert to any criticism of any subculture within any community that is not white. They regard this as an oppressive, white supremacist, imperialistic mindset which believes white, western cultures to be superior to other cultures and white people to be superior to everybody else. Despite being allegedly orientated towards social justice, they do not accept cultures which give women and racial, religious and sexual minorities equal rights and status to be better than cultures which do not. They regard any such claims and any focus on social problems within racial minority groups to be motivated by racism. This contributed to the culture which caused police to fail to investigate the Rotherham rape gangs for fears of being considered racist. These two groups feed into each other.

The third group which hinders the development of effective and ethical solutions to the problem of this kind of grooming gangs are Muslims who do not act on suspicions that others in their community are committing sexual offences for fear of dishonouring their community or being ostracised from it. The rate of reporting of sexual assault by Muslim girls is extremely low and leading Muslim women campaigners for the rights of women and girls believe this is because reporting this outside the community would bring shame and blame upon them. Similarly, Nazir Afzal, former Crown Prosecution Service’s lead on child sexual abuse, was addressing this issue over a decade ago with the Muslim community in Bradford. He reframed the issue of what is honourable and urged people who see an older man behaving suspiciously with young girls to report this to the police. He said,

We do have an issue with people of our ethnicity – it’s not the issue but an issue – and we have to take care of it, we have to deal with it. The solution comes from within. It comes from you. Don’t walk by. We’ve got to do something about this now, otherwise we won’t be in a position to hold our heads up.

The commitment of Muslims within communities where they are in a position to see suspicious and potentially predatory behaviour to reporting it would be a highly effective way of uncovering rape gangs early. Consistently shaming the perpetrators rather than their victims would provide a powerful social deterrent. Many Muslims object to the idea that they need to keep pointing out that child sexual exploitation is wrong for the same reason that they object to demands for them to condemn acts of Islamist terrorism. They believe that they should not be suspected of condoning either simply because they are Muslim in the first place. They have a point. Some of them insist that to speak of “Muslim grooming gangs” at all is Islamophobic. They do not have a point. Such gangs exist and people within a community where one is operating are in the best position to see signs of them and take action to protect the physical and mental wellbeing of children from them. Further, they should consider that being seen to take action in this way would be an effective way to reduce anti-Muslim sentiment. If this results in ostracism from a community, perhaps that is not a community they should wish to be a part of.

A forth group that can get in the way of addressing the specific problem of Muslim rape gangs are feminists, although any claims to this effect need to be qualified very carefully. While intersectional feminists can fall prey to cultural relativism that fails Muslim women in particular and women more generally, radical feminists with their focus on women as a sex class are not typically prone to this failing. They have, in fact, been at the forefront of bringing the problem to light despite accusations of racism for doing so. Therefore, they can become very annoyed when the credit for this is given to individuals like Tommy Robinson. However, some radical feminists are resistant to accepting that these particular organised rape gangs which target children are born of a deeply misogynist rape culture that exists among a subset of Muslims who despise non-Muslims. Instead, they try to make them part of the general problem with 'men' and a more universal misogyny and rape culture. I don’t think that men generally are misogynistic or in support of a rape culture, but misogynistic subcultures which are certainly exist and we can only tackle them by taking each one on its own terms, not by blanket blaming ‘men.’

That leads to the fifth group which is making this conversation more difficult and moving it away from the realm of material, measurable reality and into the realm of political narratives of good and evil. This is related to the cults of personality around Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson which present us with a nice, neat narrative about this whole issue being the fault of Labour and remedied by a change of government. This is despite Labour not being in power at the time the Rotherham scandal broke and public attention was brought to the issue and the previous Conservative government also having felt that local investigations into specific gangs were more effective. Much of the debate centres around the figure of Tommy Robinson and representations of him as a political prisoner jailed for criticising Islam, despite his convictions being for contempt of court and other petty crimes involving fraud. This reality has even been pointed out by senior politicians on the right including Nigel Farage who takes a hardline stance on immigration, particularly Muslim immigration.

I would suggest that we should be quite concerned about the extent to which Mr. Musk is able to influence public opinion on the UK government, especially when he calls for the US to impose sanctions on the UK for the imprisonment of Mr. Robinson. There was outrage and claims of ‘foreign interference’ from many American conservatives when Labour MPs announced their attention to travel to the US and campaign for Kamala Harris, but simply talking to people who consent to be talked to, whether it is Labour MPs supporting Harris or Farage joining Trump on his campaign trail does not interfere with another country’s policies. Attempts to use the economic power of the US to subvert judicial processes and get the King to dissolve parliament using economic pressure could certainly be considered as such, however. (Mr. Musk might not be aware that the last time a King Charles dissolved parliament by fiat, we beheaded him)

Meanwhile, Mr. Robinson cannot be above the law simply because he conveys a message that many are sympathetic to, including Mr Musk, at the same time as acting in contempt of court by repeating claims not found to be true under thorough investigation in civil court. There are, however, grounds to be concerned for his mental health if he does, indeed, spend nine months in solitary confinement. His supporters would do well to campaign against this. The claims of the justice system that he is isolated for his own safety due to the presence of Islamists who wish to do him harm in the prison are unsatisfactory. There must surely be prisoners who are not Islamists and do not present a risk to him with whom association can be arranged. Tommy Robinson is not a political prisoner. He is a reckless and reactive activist who tramples over laws which exist for good reason, risking causing a mistrial of gang rapists and defaming a child with claims he could not substantiate while committing various kinds of petty crime. He also founds, joins or supports organisations that include people who are unambiguously & visibly racist and expand their own ‘critiques’ way beyond Pakistani rape gangs into the demonisation of all brown Brits and often black ones too. His own rhetoric has been known to blame 'every single Muslim' for things like 7/7 and demonise whole groups of people and undermine serious efforts to talk about and address the phenomenon of Pakistani Muslim rape gangs. He has (rightly) not been prosecuted for any of that speech, though.

Mr Robinson has, in the past, acknowledged this problem and taken steps to keep virulent, hateful ethnonationalists and neo-Nazis out of organisations he is involved in, left such organisations, worked with anti-extremism organisations and stressed that he wants to oppose Islamism, not Muslims. He would do well to do this more consistently in both his activism and rhetoric.

The sixth and final group who can impede productive conversation about this issue is, I am very much afraid, my own. Liberals. Those of us who oppose collective blame and advocate treating each person as an individual and who defend freedom of belief and speech. We are certainly not opposed to criticism of Islam and will defend people’s right to do so in the harshest terms, burn Qurans (which they own) and draw insulting cartoons of prophets without being either arrested or murdered. We do not shy away from pointing out that patriarchal, misogynistic, homophobic and antisemitic ideas are frequently inspired by Islam and are thoroughly illiberal. Generalise about Muslim people, though, and discriminate against those from Muslim backgrounds? This is not something we find ethically acceptable because Muslim people are not ideologies. They are human beings with a wide range of views and personalities. This is a little infographic I wrote on the subject nearly a decade ago.

How do liberals square our individualism and opposition to negative generalisations against whole demographics of people with the reality that people who come from much more socially & religiously conservative countries that have laws and social norms that do badly on women's rights, gay rights, freedom of belief & speech and the rights of religious minorities (especially Jews) are statistically more likely to be socially & religiously conservative & have views contrary to those which uphold women's rights, gay rights, freedom of belief & speech and the rights of religious minorities (especially Jews)? Liberals don't want to think about people statistically. We are ethically opposed to this and these are very sound ethics generally!

Our focus on always treating people as individuals can cause liberals some difficulty in acknowledging that people from cultures with deeply illiberal social norms are statistically likely to bring values which are not compatible with the values of a liberal society with them and some of them will be hostile to people who do not share their religion and some will be dangerous to women and girls. We are likely to point out that defenders of the rights of women and religious and sexual minorities exist everywhere and so do violent, intolerant misogynists. This is true but does not help us address the problem of specific illiberal religious communities being enabled to form their own subculture and from within it emerge a subset of violent misogynists who have contempt for and dehumanise non-Muslim women and girls.

For some, the solution to this appears to be to become illiberal ourselves and take on a highly socially conservative ethnonationalist or Christian nationalist mindset, but most people do not want to live in one of those anymore than we’d want to live in one run on Sharia Law. Liberalism is the feature of Western liberal democracies that distinguishes it from illiberal theocracies and totalitarian states and we’d like to keep it that way. Frying pans and fires come to mind.

Liberal conservatives are probably the group with the combination of philosophical underpinnings - the liberal tradition and the conservative tradition - best equipped to navigate this minefield. They are the conservatives whose drive to conserve includes the conservation of the liberal philosophical tradition. They tend to be unapologetic about welcoming to our country only people who have a deep and genuine respect for its liberal traditions and who want to integrate into it and become a full part of it, recognising themselves as part of a society to which they are loyal and in which they are invested. When people apply to join a country, they believe they should be required to demonstrate themselves to be a good fit with those liberal values and to be willing to be part of a nationwide community. Individualism is good, but this includes individual responsibility and working towards cultural cohesion is one of those responsibilities. This includes addressing problems within one’s own community when they endanger the safety of the broader community. Nazir Azfal spoke to this sense of responsibility using the concept of ‘good neighbours.’

Don’t walk by. My 15-year-old boy was playing snooker a few months back and noticed these young girls and these older men. Maybe he is more aware than he ought to be, but he came home and told dad, and dad told the police and the police acted on that information. This is what we should be doing – routinely, daily, all the time, everywhere. When you are suspicious, you act on that suspicion. People say to me: do you want us to grass every one up? Do you want whistleblowers? No! I want good neighbours. It could be your child, your friend’s child next. How are you going to make sure you share your suspicions and stand up for the society you are a part of?

I like this concept of “good neighbours.” This, I would suggest, is the mentality we need right now. This is the right way to have the necessary conversations and effectively address the problem of religiously-aggravated rape gangs that despise, dehumanise and brutally assault women and girls whose wellbeing everybody should be expected to care about.

We must reject and ignore the virulent racists who care only about what people look like or what religious background they have and nothing for what their values are or what kind of neighbours they are. We need to dismiss the culturally relativist posturings of the Critical Social Justice activists and reject their claim that any objection to deeply illiberal and even abusive cultural values is racist and imperialistic. We must expect British Muslims to respect and value non-Muslims and feel a bond of loyalty to them and to our country and report any suspicions of predatory behaviour to the police for the integrity of the Muslim community and wellbeing of the broader one. We should respect and thank the feminists who have been working on this problem for so long but urge any of them inclined to regard the problem as ‘men’ to recognise misogynistic and predatory subcultures for maximally effective and focused activism. We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by foreign or local cults of personality spinning simplistic political narratives which do not align with reality. We must urge liberals to temper their pure individualism with a recognition of cultural difference and lean into the conservative aspect of liberalism which enables us to assertively defend both our liberal traditions and cultural cohesion.

The current mass of discourses on this topic create a tangled mess which is preventing us from doing anything productive to address the problem. The first step towards fixing that is to untangle ourselves.