The Not Asian Grooming gangs

The Asian Crime Century briefing 102

News in the UK in the past week has been dominated by reports of “grooming gangs” that were involved in the abuse of young girls. This is not new news as the shocking nature of the abuse has been known for the past several decades, but after Elon Musk started to mention the situation on his social media platform X there has been renewed interest and scrutiny of the situation both in the UK as well as around the world.

Much of the recent debate has centred on whether parts of the UK government at local and national level have not been sufficiently open and transparent about aspects of the cases. This concern developed after Musk tweeted on 1 January “Shameful conduct by Jess Phillips. Throw her out.” The post was in response to reports that Jess Phillips, Minister for Safeguarding in the UK Government, had written a letter on 29 October 2024 to Oldham Council to inform them that “It is for Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the government to intervene.” (The letter from Oldham Council requesting a national government inquiry was dated 17 July 2024, and it is surprising that the reply from the Minister took over three months).

Musk tweeted on 3 January that “Jess Philips is a rape genocide apologist” and the same day that “Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years. Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.” Musk subsequently continued to post a large number of comments about the “grooming gangs” scandal, many of which are abusive at best and simply untrue at worst.

However, by reigniting news media and public interest in the “grooming gangs” scandal Musk has caused many difficult questions to be raised about how the long running series of cases was handled and if the UK government is avoiding public scrutiny of the background of most of the perpetrators of the crimes to avoid worsening racial tensions. Working to avoid racial tensions is admirable, but doing so by suppressing (or avoiding) a holistic national view and understanding of the “grooming gangs” has led to growing public concern.

If a large number, or most, of the perpetrators involved in “grooming gangs” fit a specific racial profile then this is critical information to be considered transparently so that government and society can understand if these crimes were related to or driven by any race related social problems. Avoiding this question and failing to be transparent with a national holistic view of the “grooming gangs” is not only negligent but also risks worsening race relations as parts of the population will attribute blame without sufficient facts. A holistic investigation and report is needed.

Grooming Gangs or Asian gangs?

Douglas Murray of The Spectator has pointed out that “Asian” grooming gangs is a misleading term and that there were no “Japanese men prowling our cities for what former home secretary Jack Straw described as the ‘easy meat’ of white working-class girls” (and also no Chinese, or Indian, or Indonesian, or Mongolian, or Singaporean, or Thai men for that matter). Murray writes that “These obfuscating phrases were designed to cover up the fact that the perpetrators were almost all Muslim men of Pakistani origin and their victims almost all white working-class girls selected by their abusers because of their race.”

But is this correct? There are not “Asian grooming gangs”, but has the problem been driven by perpetrators who are of Pakistani origin? There is not a holistic answer to this question because there has not been a national inquiry into all of the cases that has reported holistically on the perpetrators in all of the towns where the gangs operated and the crimes took place. There have been localised inquiries, which provide a local snapshot of the local situation but not a holistic national overview.

The national inquiry conducted by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has published 19 reports on 15 investigations with a final report published in October 2022. The report is a broad one with a scope to “consider the extent to which State and non-State institutions have failed in their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation; to consider the extent to which those failings have since been addressed; to identify further action needed to address any failings identified; to consider the steps which it is necessary for State and non-State institutions to take in order to protect children from such abuse in future; and to publish a report with recommendations.”

The scope of the inquiry and its final report do not provide an overview of the “grooming gangs” that preyed on young girls in towns across the UK, but is focussed on the conduct of institutions and their response or failure to respond to allegations of child sexual abuse. The report explores in great detail how many individual victims have been “groomed” by their abusers. The report deals with the nature of grooming, how it relates to existing laws, but not any overview of “grooming gangs” and the cases that involved them. It is hence misleading for UK government officials to claim that there has been an inquiry into the subject, as the inquiry was not intended to review “grooming gangs” and has not done so.

To understand what are “grooming gangs” in the UK and if race has been a key part of the activities of these gangs, a holistic review of major criminal cases is required. It is patently obvious that a local review in one city by a local council will not provide such a holistic understanding.

In January 2024, the most recent “grooming gang” case to be heard in the courts was in Dundee. The city, once one of Britain’s most vibrant economic centres famous for jute (Camperdown Works, Tay Works), jam (Keller’s, Mackays), and journalism (DC Thomson), is now a shadow of its former self with 30 percent of the adult population economically inactive and drug related deaths that have been the highest in Europe. The dismal social situation is reflected in the stream of criminal cases in Dundee. The Dundee case involved a gang of four Romanian men and one woman who were found guilty of charges relating to raping, sexually abusing and trafficking for sex ten local women aged between 16 and 30. This was a “grooming gang” that lured women into relationships and then abused them as well as trafficked them as sex workers. The gang members are from Romania, not Asia (although this does raise the question of how they came to be in the UK).

In 2023, five men were convicted of sexual offences against two teenage girls in Rochdale, one of whom was aged 12 when the abuse started, between 2002 and 2006. The convicted men are Mohammed Ghani, Insar Hussain, Jahn Shahid Ghani, Martin Rhodes, and Ali Razza Hussain Kazmi. Four of the perpetrators are of Pakistani heritage and one is of white British heritage.

In 2018, twenty men were found guilty of charges relating to over 120 criminal offences involving rape an abuse of 15 girls as young as 11 years old in Huddersfield (and one with a mental age of 7). The victims were given alcohol and drugs before abusing the girls between 2004 and 2011. The court heard that many of the perpetrators have not been identified. The BBC reported that the men “are all British Asians mainly of Pakistani heritage”, which is slightly misleading. The convicted men are Amere Singh Dhaliwal, Irfan Ahmed, Zahid Hassan, Mohammed Kammer, Mohammed, Rizwan Aslam, Abdul Rehman, Raj Singh Barsran, Nahman Mohammeds, Mansoor Akhtar, Wiqas Mahmud, Nasarat Hussain, Sajid Hussain, Mohammed Irfraz, Faisal Nadeem, Mohammed Azeem, Manzoor Hassan, Mohammed Akram, Niaz Ahmed, Asif Bashir, and Mohammed Imran Ibrar. One of these men is a Sihk, and all of the remainder are of Pakistani heritage or origin. It is misleading, by the BBC in this instance, to state that the perpetrators were “British Asian”. Almost all of the perpetrators were clearly of Pakistani heritage or origin.

In 2012, nine men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged between 13 and 22 in Rochdale between 2005 to 2013 (one of the accused was not identified at the time for legal reasons). The convicted men are Abdul Rauf, Hamid Safi, Mohammed Sajid, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Qayyum, Adil Khan, Mohammed Amin and Kabeer Hassan. All are of Pakistani heritage.

In 2010, eight men were convicted in Derbyshire in three separate trials on charges of rape and sexual assault against 26 young girls, one of whom was aged 13 at the time of the offences. The convicted men are Abid Mohammed Saddique, Mohammed Romaan Liaqat, Mohammed Imran Rehman, Akshay Kumar, Faisal Mehmood, Farooq Ahmed, Naweed Liaqat, and Graham Blackman. Seven of the perpetrators are of Pakistani heritage, and one is of white British heritage.

Alexis Jay Rotherham report

In 2014, Professor Alexis Jay published a report from an Independent Inquiry that was commissioned by the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council in October 2013 with a remit to investigate child sexual exploitation in the town from 1997 to 2013. The Jay report was commissioned in 2013 and took only a year to complete (which is far faster than most government inquiries). The Jay report highlighted how the issue of the racial origin of perpetrators had been ignored, with multiple comments regarding how this was relevant:

“By far the majority of perpetrators were described as 'Asian' by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue.” (Executive Summary, page 2).

“There was too much reliance by agencies on traditional community leaders such as elected members and imams as being the primary conduit of communication with the Pakistani-heritage community. The Inquiry spoke to several Pakistani-heritage women who felt disenfranchised by this and thought it was a barrier to people coming forward to talk about CSE. Others believed there was wholesale denial of the problem in the Pakistani-heritage community in the same way that other forms of abuse were ignored. Representatives of women's groups were frustrated that interpretations of the Borough's problems with CSE were often based on an assumption that similar abuse did not take place in their own community and therefore concentrated mainly on young white girls.” (Issues of Ethnicity, page 91)

“In Rotherham, the majority of known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage including the five men convicted in 2010.” (Ethnic Minorities and Safeguarding Issues, page 92)

“One senior officer suggested that some influential Pakistani-heritage councillors in Rotherham had acted as barriers.” (95)

“The Deputy Council Leader (2011-2014) from the Pakistani-heritage community was clear that he had not understood the scale of the CSE problem in Rotherham until 2013. He then disagreed with colleague elected members on the way to approach it. He had advocated taking the issue 'head on' but had been overruled. He was one of the elected members who said they thought the criminal convictions in 2010 were 'a one-off, isolated case', and not an example of a more deep-rooted problem of Pakistani-heritage perpetrators targeting young white girls. This was at best naïve, and at worst ignoring a politically inconvenient truth.” (Political Engagement, page 93)

“One of the local Pakistani women's groups described how Pakistani-heritage girls were targeted by taxi drivers and on occasion by older men lying in wait outside school gates at dinner times and after school. They also cited cases in Rotherham where Pakistani landlords had befriended Pakistani women and girls on their own for purposes of sex, then passed on their name to other men who had then contacted them for sex. The women and girls feared reporting such incidents to the Police because it would affect their future marriage prospects.” (Pakistani-heritage women and girls. (Page 94)

“Agencies should acknowledge the suspected model of localised grooming of young white girls by men of Pakistani heritage, instead of being inhibited by the fear of affecting community relations.” (2013, page 147)

The Alexis Jay report is a damning indictment of the Pakistani heritage community as well as the local authorities failing to address a problem of systematic sexual abuse committed almost entirely by Pakistani men. Yet these facts are not mentioned in the national Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. Although the national inquiry has a strong focus on victims and understanding their stories, it is surely relevant that the most shocking case of child sexual abuse caused by “grooming gangs”, in Rochdale, involved men of Pakistani-heritage.

* * *

The criminal cases heard in courts in the UK suggest that the large majority of perpetrators involved in “grooming gangs” that have been identified by the police in major investigations are of Pakistani heritage. They are not “Asian grooming gangs”. There are no criminal cases involving Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Mongolian, Singaporean, or Thai men involved in “grooming gangs” in the UK in the past two decades.

But the men identified in these “grooming gangs” are often identified by the news media as “Asian” or not identified by their race at all. This is not a cover up, as has been suggested by some opportunistic politicians. However, it does suggest an avoidance of acknowledgment that almost all of the perpetrators identified in the major criminal cases prosecuted are of Pakistani heritage. It is a fundamental and important question to ask why this is so.

The national Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse published in October 2022 was strongly focussed on victims and did not explore the racial and cultural background of the perpetrators of the major cases. There has not been a national inquiry that has focussed on the perpetrators and why it seems that almost all of them involved in the major cases prosecuted come from Pakistani heritage communities. It is reasonable to ask why this is so.