Multicultural Society Faces Controversy: Child Exploitation Cases by Grooming Groups and Lack of Protest from Progressive Feminists
The silence from the so-called 'progressive feminists' on the issue of sexual exploitation of girls by grooming gangs is deafening. With industrial-scale exploitation top of the news agenda, you’d think these folks would have lots to say—but nope.
As Louise Casey’s audit on grooming gangs was released last week, forcing Keir Starmer to u-turn on his opposition to a national inquiry, the professional feminist set remains surprisingly quiet. The report highlights what victims, parents, and a handful of journalists have been trying to communicate for decades: that thousands of young girls across the UK have been sexually exploited by grooming gangs, most of whom are Pakistani Muslim men.
Crimes against these children include gang rapes, beatings, druggings, enforced pregnancies, enforced abortions, and even murder, such as the case where an abuser set a home on fire. Many of the victims were pre-pubescent children. But still, the silence continues.
I’m not talking about every feminist out there—far from it. Veterans of feminist struggles like journalist Julie Bindel and many gender-critical campaigners have been vocal in their condemnation of the rape gangs. But there are certain elite feminists who display some truly twisted priorities.
Recently, these elite feminists have launched campaigns against things like 'manspreading', 'mansize' tissues, and 'sexist thermostat settings'. They’ve pushed for 'period positivity', gender self-ID, and raged over fleeting hand contacts or awkward watercooler encounters. Maybe once their busy schedules free up, they’ll have a few choice words to say about the mass rape of working-class girls.
The grooming-gangs scandal reveals a lot about the state of progressive feminism in Britain. It seems their sympathies only extend to certain types of women with certain types of problems, caused by certain types of men. It’s darkly comic that ‘feminism’ which reminds men that 'staring is sexual harassment' ignores the endemic, violent abuse of thousands of girls for decades.
In London, sexual violence against women and girls rose by 7.4% in the past year. London mayor Sadiq Khan, a 'proud feminist', has said nothing about the grooming gangs since Starmer’s announcement of a national inquiry. He once refused to answer whether he believes there are any rape gangs active in London, a city where sexual violence is rampant.
The Labour government has also been dismal nationally. Despite promising to 'halve violence against women and girls' and addressing the 'root causes of abuse and violence', they only launched an inquiry into grooming gangs when they realized dissembling was no longer an option. Resistance to a national inquiry came from self-described 'gobby feminist' Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, and Lucy Powell, leader of the House of Commons. They dismissed the grooming-gangs issue as a 'dogwhistle'.
Believe all women was the #MeToo mantra, but this wasn’t extended to the girls who were raped above kebab shops in Ramsgate or Rochdale. They had to keep quiet for the good of multiculturalism. Wrong type of girl, wrong type of perpetrator. Those who acknowledged the problem were accused of peddling some kind of racist theory.
The squeamishness around tackling abuse when it is committed by migrants or ethnic minorities extends well beyond grooming gangs. UK-wide, foreign nationals are convicted in a quarter of all recorded sex crimes. In London, two-thirds of arrests related to sex crimes are of foreign nationals. Are we even allowed to talk about this?
The grooming-gangs scandal turns the narrative on its head: the crimes of minority offenders were covered up by every wing of the state. But the woke intersectionalists seem unaffected.
When commentators deign to comment on disparities in the crime data, feminists in academia and the NGO world ignore the role of culture. They say such statistics are an artefact of who gets stopped, arrested, and charged. They think the justice system is 'systemically racist'. The grooming-gangs scandal exposes this as foolish.
When migrants come from countries where female genital mutilation, honor killings, or rapists are let off the hook if they marry their victim, we shouldn’t expect such ideas and practices to disappear at Dover. We need to make serious efforts to integrate people into society, to make it clear where we stand and what is expected of new arrivals. Yet even acknowledging that we have a problem with integration is treated as heresy.
As if spurious accusations of racism haven’t already done enough to keep people silent, the UK government is about to make matters worse. They want to bring in an official definition of 'Islamophobia', based on a report produced by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims in 2019. This definition insists that debating grooming gangs works to 'humiliate',' marginalize' and 'stigmatize' Muslims. Should a similar definition be imposed on the government, it's certain to chill the discussions we need to have about sexual violence.
One terrible irony of all this is that among those who suffer most from this pervasive culture of silence are women from minority and Muslim backgrounds. In recent years, we’ve seen women from these backgrounds asking for help multiple times before they were slaughtered in so-called honor killings. We might expect these women to feel unable to speak out in patriarchal, theocratic countries—but this is modern Britain. Why was nobody listening?
These are the bitter fruits of Western cultural relativism. Victims are ignored because the crimes committed against them are considered politically incorrect. Perpetrators are held to different standards. We’re told all cultures are equal, even those that provide fertile ground for violent misogyny. Until the great and good find their collective spine, they will continue to fail women and girls.
- The silence from certain elite feminists on the issue of grooming gangs extends beyond the mass rape of working-class girls, as they focus their energy on addressing issues like manspreading, sexist thermostat settings, and period positivity.
- The culture of silence regarding the crimes of minority offenders by some progressives seems unaffected by the grooming-gangs scandal, as they ignore the role of culture in the justice system and instead label statistics on crime data as an artifact of systemic racism.
- In modern Britain, victims from minority and Muslim backgrounds, including women who have been slaughtered in so-called honor killings, have faced ignorance and a lack of support due to Western cultural relativism, which equates all cultures as equal and makes victims of misogyny politically incorrect.
