Elon Musk has seized on UK grooming gangs issue for his own cause, not for rape victims

The figure of the Pakistani immigrant sexual groomer is real—but also serves as a pretext for failing to address toxic youth masculinity and deep vulnerabilities of young women.

Elon Musk | Image Source: X

Little gaggles of children would join the crowds that assembled outside working-class pubs to watch the sport. “I can remember as a boy one Sunday afternoon after closing time, a glorious afternoon,” William Bowen recalled of 1880s Salford, “A crowd came out of a public house with two men stripped to their naked waists, and they fought until their bodies were streaming with blood. I thought, when I am a man I would like to be able to fight like that.” Losing fights often invited savage beatings from fathers: “They’re not going to make a girl of my lad.”

Large numbers of young women—drawn from the new underclass of fame workers beginning to fill factories and businesses—studded the street gangs that emerged from this culture of violence. Trading sex for status, and excitement, historian Stephen Humphries has written, the women also sought the security of belonging to a simulacrum of a family.

Earlier this week, technology billionaire Elon Musk denounced the United Kingdom’s political leadership for failing to act against ethnic Pakistani street gangs known to have sexually abused large numbers of mainly White girls, starting in the 1990s. The reluctance to act against child sexual exploitation (CSE), Musk seemed to suggest, was enmeshed with a wider political culture of appeasing immigrant Muslims.

Facts don’t bear out these claims. The sexual abuse cases have, in fact, been investigated by multiple high-level inquiries, and they have resulted in convictions too. Failures of policing that led victims to be ignored have also been acknowledged. 

The question of race?

Everyone knew, it turned out. The name of the 13-year-old victim had been scrawled in the disused parking lot where she was raped, and the 12 men who attacked her wrote their names below hers, journalists observed, “in the same way that, say, young lovers might innocently carve their initials on a tree.” Local residents of Devonshire Street, in the northern English town of Keighley, sometimes walked past the spot even while she was being raped, it turned out. For a full year, the torture went on.

Like many other victims, the girl from Keighley came from a deprived background, had delivered drugs for one of the  men who raped her, and changed her testimony to police for fear of violence. Even though the perpetrators received a collective 143 years in jail, other victims were disbelieved by authorities. 

There is reason to suspect, too, that investigators were deterred from aggressive pursuit of CSE charges against Pakistani-origin perpetrators because of concerns over the racial fallout. Fearful of fuelling racial tensions, Channel 4 controversially delayed broadcasting journalist Anna Hall’s brilliant documentary on the case.

Following the exposure of similar cases—most infamously, in Rochdale and Rotherham but also Oxford, Derby, Leeds, Aylesbury, Telford, Banbury, Middlesbrough, Dewsbury, Carlisle, Burnley and Blackpool—dozens of British-born men from ethnic Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds have been imprisoned. The grooming gang has become a metaphor for all that has gone wrong with British multiculturalism.

A colour-blind crime

The problem is, the data doesn’t tell the same story as the headlines. In December 2020, a paper issued by the United Kingdom’s Home Office cited research which “found that group-based CSE offenders are most commonly White.” The report said it was difficult to establish racial patterns among offenders, “due to issues such as data-quality problems, the way the samples were selected in studies, and the potential for bias and inaccuracies in the way that ethnicity data is collected.” 

An earlier research, published in 2014, showed that 42 per cent of the 1,231 perpetrators identified as involved in CSE were White, followed by Blacks at 17 per cent, and 14 per cent Asian. Ella Cobain, who has researched CSE data, suggests that the apparent overrepresentation of Blacks and Asians among perpetrators could be an artefact of the geographical regions in which the studies were conducted.

Labour politicians, like their Conservative and far-right counterparts, were quick to voice claims that Asian predators were assaulting white women. Former Labour MP Jack Straw alleged, notably, that British Asian youth were “fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits.” Thus, White girls were treated as “easy meat.” 

Tim Loughton, who was a minister in 2012, claimed that “closed communities” had allowed CSE gangs to operate with impunity. 

The problem with these claims is all perpetrators of child sexual violence enjoy impunity—not just Asian Muslims. A recent official report by scholar Alexis Jay noted that an estimated one in six girls and one in 20 boys experience child sexual abuse in the UK. The institutions involved included churches, schools, and child care facilities. For the most part, police failed to adequately investigative victims’ allegations—just as they have done in cases involving ethnic Pakistani gangs

As the feminist scholar Judith Orr argues, the debate around culture and rape is a disingenuous one. Football stars and their representatives, she notes, aren’t reviled for cruising the streets of Manchester to pick up women for having sex, often while being filmed. In one case, a public support group was set up to demonstrate solidarity for Welsh international Ched Evans, who was sentenced to five years in prison for rape.

“We do not see front pages devoted to denouncing the misogynist culture of football, or calls for footballers as a collective to examine why a number of their colleagues have been accused of sex crimes,” Orr notes. “Yet all the time Muslim representatives are called upon to denounce the crimes as if in some way by nature of a shared religion they are collectively responsible.”

A toxic culture

For a deeper understanding of the problem, it’s necessary to reflect on how male youth culture derives agency and prestige from exerting power over women. Rooted largely in neighbourhood loyalties rather than older religious ties, gangs emerged across the working-class districts of northern England during the late nineteenth century as traditional institutions disintegrated. Fighting—known as “scuttling”—became a way for disempowered youth to claim at least a simulacrum of power, if not the real thing.  

The first generation of women to enjoy an independent income, young women in Manchester and Salford often joined the scuttlers, historian Andrew Davies records, shocking contemporaries with their sometimes lewd public behaviour. This rebellion, however, brought another form of subordination—this time to young men who embraced highly conservative ideas of masculinity.

For many young women who become victims of CSE, scholar Sophie Hallet points out, “the exchange of sex appears as an expected condition or a viable option—perhaps the only or best one available at that point.” In a society where street gangs provide the only escape from oppressive homes or care facilities, “exchanging sex is cast as something expected, acceptable or a least-worst option.”

The figure of the Pakistani immigrant sexual groomer is real—but also serves as a pretext for failing to address toxic youth masculinity and the deep vulnerabilities of young women in societies that claim to be guardians of liberal values. Like many racial chauvinists before him, Elon Musk appears to have seized on the issue for his own cause, not for the victims.

Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)