White Lies

Grooming gang apologist are fabricating 'white grooming gangs'

The issue of what are euphemistically dubbed ‘grooming gangs’ has suddenly returned to the spotlight after the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, seemed to find out about the atrocity for the first time.

For those of us who have known about the scandal for many years – for those, like me, who stumbled upon the Jay Report on Rotherham in our teenage years, the extracts of which have forever remained painfully etched in our brains – what has re-emerged into the mainstream airwaves is depressingly familiar. But perhaps most infuriating is that the same tactics of denial and downplaying of the atrocities - by now well-rehearsed for decades and a large factor in why they were allowed to go on for so long - have re-emerged too.

One such tactic is to deny and obfuscate the explicitly ethno-religious dimension of the abuse. In countless testimonies, victims recount how they were subjected to racial slurs like ‘white slag’, ‘white cunt’, and ‘gori’ (quote from one survivor: ‘They made it clear that because I was a non-Muslim, and not a virgin, and because I didn’t dress “modestly”, that they believed I deserved to be “punished”’). The racially aggravated element of these crimes is key to understanding why they took place, as well as why they were covered up.

To acknowledge the racial dimension of the atrocity, and to highlight that these were crimes overwhelmingly perpetrated by specifically Mirpuri men, is to force oneself to address what to most are uncomfortable and prior-busting truths. So many have opted to either bury their heads in the sand (the charitable take) or engage in brazen atrocity denial and disinformation.

Instead of confronting the demographics of the perpetrators, there has been a concerted propaganda campaign to deny that there existed a specific racial pattern at all. It is claimed that whilst some grooming gangs are indeed made up of ‘Asian’ men, many others are made up of white British men. Child abusers are said to come from all communities, with no specific group overrepresented. Any emphasis on the racial characteristics of perpetrators is thus rendered suspect and illegitimate.

One way this argument is propagated is by brazenly lying, making it seem like white individuals who were convicted of various other sex crimes were actually convicted of group-based child sexual exploitations, or in other words that they were members of ‘white grooming gangs’. This is done in the widely circulated image below:

The image is in clear reference to another widely-circulated mugshot collage of members of various grooming gangs that operated across Britain. The difference is obvious; in the former, all the abusers are white, in this they are predominantly Asian:

Having read so much on the patterns and make up of grooming gangs, I was immediately suspicious of the first image’s veracity. Surely, if there had been so many all-white grooming gangs, at least a few would have broken out into mainstream news?

So I did a little digging, and sure enough, it turned out that the mugshots shown were not of grooming gang members at all. By reverse image searching some of the higher resolution mugshots in the collage, I found that the mugshots shown were of men convicted of sex crimes that were completely unrelated to one another.

Of the four men who were made out to seem like they were part of a Manchester grooming gang, one is a football coach convicted of indecent assault on his young players, one is a police officer who shared images of underage cadets on a paedophile website, one is a ‘committed paedophile’ convicted of sharing and encouraging videos of babies being raped, and one is a man convicted of multiple child rapes. Each of the men were convicted of sex crimes, and all were based in Manchester, yet the cases were completely unrelated to one another and had nothing to do with ‘white grooming gangs’.

Similarly with the collages from Stoke and Huddersfield, mugshots were taken from articles that listed some of the various perpetrators of unrelated sex crimes in those areas from the previous year. None of them were related to grooming gangs, many were not convicted of child sex crimes, and in one case it was not even related to a person (he raped a horse).

So this piece of propaganda that purports to show that Britain is suffering from a scrouge of white grooming gangs is a complete lie. What it shows is that across Britain there have been some unrelated sex crimes perpetrated by white people. But no one is denying that, nor is it what the whole scandal is about; what is being discussed here is the organised, co-ordinated, community enabled trafficking, rape, and torture of underage girls who were targeted due to their vulnerability and race. To divert the conversation to cases of sex abuse more generally is to downplay the unique severity of what took place and engage in cynical whataboutism.

The intention of this misleading image can also be inferred by the nature of the most prominent people who have been disseminating it. Some of the biggest accounts who have shared it include Dilly Hussein (editor at 5Pillars), Aboo Hafsah (bio: ‘unapologetically Muslim’), journalist Taj Ali, ‘historian’ Adnan Rashid, ‘One Dawah’, and many, many more. These are all large accounts with tens, if not hundreds of thousands of followers. They also all appear to be Muslims, spreading misinformation to cover for their own.

This should be of grave concern to any right-minded person. First, because we should all be interested in pursuing the truth for its own sake, and the truth is that though there are some examples of white grooming gangs, the vast majority are comprised of Pakistanis. Second, and more pertinently, because it was exactly this attitude of denial of and disinformation about the true nature of the problem that allowed it to go on for so long. Shining a light on the demographics of the perpetrators is a source of understandable discomfort for those of the same community, but it is a discomfort that must be endured and overcome to ensure such atrocities never occur again, and a discomfort that ultimately pales in comparison to the unimaginable torture those poor girls went through.