Untangling Grooming Gangs

How The Host Culture Facilitates Them

(This is a version of an article to be published in February’s edition of ALIVE magazine)

One of the most disturbing news stories of recent weeks concerns the proliferation of gangs of violent sexual predators of Muslim origin in a number of English towns and cities. The story has been simmering for more than a decade. Following a targeted police investigation in Oxford, a large gang of some twenty young men were convicted and given lengthy prison sentences in 2015. Their crimes had been committed over a lengthy period, stretching back to the late 1990s. Various local enquiries took place and a Home Office enquiry in 2020 concluded there was no link between ‘ethnicity and grooming gangs’.

There is however a pattern across towns as diverse as Oxford, Telford, Oldham, Rotherham and Derby in the UK of young men of Muslim origin, largely but not exclusively Pakistani, targeting underage, vulnerable white girls. There is the same pattern of neglect by both social services and police. There is the same hesitancy about risking allegations of racial bias by pursuing or even reporting such incidents.

It is quite astonishing in a culture obsessed with micro-aggressions and inappropriate behavior and language in the workplace and beyond, a culture that interprets ’safety’ in ever broader terms, that the horrific abuse of these helpless, young girls would be of so little account, even today. The UK Labour government with its strident socially progressive agenda has rejected a call for a comprehensive national enquiry. It is an ongoing as well as an historic story; grooming by gangs is still happening and police authorities in England and Wales estimate that there were over 600 gangs still operating across the country in the first nine months of 2024.

For Starmer and his government, the story is being weaponized by anti-immigrant, ‘far right’ elements who want to exploit it for their own aims. It is true that for many people this story vindicates their opposition to multiculturalism where widely opposing attitudes and values clash irreconcilably. This is certainly pertinent to this debate but it is not the only layer or even the most important one in the story.

The underlying scandal here is the disregard for the breakdown of family structures across western societies. Before these girls were exploited by opportunistic gangs, before they were failed by the police and the social services, they were failed, for whatever reason, by their own families. Their parents and wider families appear in all cases to be either greatly negligent or completely absent. Very many of the girls were in care homes of one sort or another. Without this underlying factor, none of the brutality and terror visited on them would have been possible. There has not been a single mention of this factor in anything I have read and there has been a vast amount of columns and podcasts and debates across platforms from Australia to the UK to the US.

The bottom line is that our social mores are not working to protect the most vulnerable or make our society safe and secure for all its citizens. The climbing statistics of crime, including appalling domestic violence against babies and small children, doesn’t ever seem to raise fundamental questions. Instead we get an exponential array of interventions and responses of every kind from a growing army of agencies, both governmental and non governmental. And nothing changes; it continues to get worse. Doing the same thing over and over and getting the same unsatisfactory results is one well known definition of folly that western governments have yet to apply it to themselves.

This is in part the context for the appalling abuse by Muslim gangs. They come from a very different culture that strongly signals its girls and women are off limits for any level of sexual predation. In Britain, these young men find themselves in what appears to be a moral wilderness of promiscuity and depravity. Unchaperoned girls, often in sexually provocative clothing, wandering around unaccompanied at night, signals availability to one degree or other. In truth, they attract predation from males of all ethnicities. TV documentaries have highlighted how white men, in groups or alone, prey on compatriot, young women in holiday hotspots and engage in behaviors they would not practice at home simply because of their sense of being ‘in another country’ where the usual rules and restraints don’t quite apply. The prevailing drug and alcohol culture of our time contributes in no small part to this opportunism.

The commercialisation and commodification of sex online is also a major contributing background factor in our sexually abusive society. Abuse and exploitation, including monetised self-exploitation, goes beyond the predation and opportunism of strangers. Even what appears to be a stable relationship or marriage can implode under the disruptive infiltration of porn sites in the lives of one or both partners.

Media stories reveal how wealthy, talented and famous ‘golden couples’ who appear to have it all are sucked into the online sewers of kink and perversion. One example concerns singer/songwriter Lily Allen who recently separated from her husband because she was unwilling to gratify his new found desires and because she found out, according to reports, that he had found other women online who were happy to give him what he wanted. Ironically, Lily herself had, up to the breakup of her marriage, an account with ‘Only Fans’, an online hub where women sell sexually provocative photos of themselves. In Lily’s case, the photos were of her feet. It is truly a measure of our hyper sexualised, fetish crazed and degenerate culture that a successful musical artiste can earn multiples more for photos of her feet than recordings of her lovely voice as she publicly acknowledged. She is not alone among celebrities in venturing into this murky world of easy money making by virtually selling her body.

Another manifestation of how sexual deviancy finds ever more surprising expressions in public life is the behaviour of rap artiste Kanye West who flaunts his close to naked wife, Bianca Censori, in public outings on the streets of cities across the globe as he himself wears clothing that covers him from head to foot.

This is the wider culture that validates sexual behaviours outside the conventions and moral parameters our culture has been casting aside since the sexual revolution. It is only within this wider frame that the crimes of the rather euphemistically named grooming gangs and the response they evoked can be understood.

The sordid stories we read in our newspapers about male predation at every social level, often in transcripts of court cases, is testament enough that sexual abuse has nothing to be with ethnicity. It has everything to do with social, moral and religious mores and their personal appropriation or rejection. It has a lot to do with opportunity too, as does every other kind of wrongdoing. Without mores and the defenses we construct around them, human nature tends to lapse to ever deepening depths of moral degradation. Relativised concepts like ‘consent’ and ‘decency’ are no substitutes for a coherent moral framework.

Ethnicity may be said to be a factor only in so far as an ethnicity is associated with an view that regards women of another culture as inferior and not entitled to the respect and protection afforded its own women. There is also the argument that Islam in some of its iterations allows the sexual and physical domination of Muslim women by their husbands and viciously punishes women rather than men for sexual transgressions. Islam is a faith, not an ethnicity. So, correctly speaking, there is a cultural rather than an ethnic dimension to this debate. The distinction is important.

This is a complex and multilayered story and one that has implications for all western countries that share the very same challenges in a socially and morally disintegrated, rapidly secularizing, and equally rapidly culturally diversifying social order