Grooming gangs are still getting away with it – we Muslims must speak out

Bravo and God Bless, I say, to Natalie Fleet, the new Safeguarding minister, who has just announced a government crackdown on grooming gangs.

Fleet got the job after Jess Phillips resigned from the Government during the turbulent week recently, when some cabinet ministers, disillusioned with Sir Keir Starmer, chose to return to the backbenches.

Fleet herself became pregnant when she was just 15, after being groomed and used by an older man. So she has lived experience of how adult men trap and sexually use children, and what it does to the heads, hearts and bodies of victims. That is why she speaks with such urgency and passion about the need for action: “Child sexual abuse and exploitation can scar people for life. For years, I carried the shame. […] When I say victims and survivors must be heard and protected, I mean it. When I say their abusers and rapists must face justice, I mean it.”

Let me lay down some facts. Men of all backgrounds and ages rape girls, women, boys and other men. An official report in 2020 concluded that the majority of child sex abuse gangs in England, Wales and Scotland were made up of white men under 30. Yet, today, many indigenous Britons have come to believe that white girls are in serious danger only from brown Pakistani “paedos” and dark-skinned asylum seekers.

As an Asian and Muslim, a feminist and believer in universal rights, I am morally obliged to condemn all predators, brown, white and black. All should be denounced, tried and punished. Unlike some other antiracists, I have never shirked from writing about and damning the grotesque sexual abuse networks of mostly British-Pakistani men from some tightly knit communities in Rochdale, Telford and Rotherham. Thousands of young white girls were controlled, abused and made to sleep with older men. Some were 12 years old and came from troubled homes. This is still going on, though not as brazenly as before.

I once wrote a piece about a fully veiled young Muslim woman from a northern town who showed me terrible bruises on her body inflicted by her father and brothers. They were later jailed for abusing young white girls. Some years back, I arranged a secret meeting with and interviewed three wives of jailed groomers. They had been brought over as teenagers and made to marry men who routinely raped them. Two of them remained blindly faithful to the foul husbands.

I have often criticised communities that protected the men, and the indifferent police officers, social workers, and MPs who stood by. Those legitimate journalistic investigations led to some Asians calling me a race traitor and bounty bar (meaning brown on the outside, white on the inside) and threats from some British-Pakistani hoodlums. This doesn’t happen too often now. Times have changed.

Many more Muslims now accept that their silence failed the victims and has enabled Tommy Robinson and his gang of racist thugs to foment anti-Muslim hatred across the land. Blaming all of us for these crimes is totally unfair. But life is unfair. An anonymous group created a fake column by me and posted it on X. It falsely quoted me blaming the young girls for being promiscuous and entrapping older Muslim men. I got screamed at on the streets. Outside Parliament, one man called me a “Muslim traitor, f***ing groomer’s c**t”.

Last weekend, I was invited to join panels and deliver a solo speech at the How The Light Gets In festival in Hay-on-Wye. The talk was on how disloyalty is essential for a good, free, and honest life. The tent filled up. People were intrigued. The proposition took aback some very learned men and women. They wrongly thought I was being playful or flippant. I meant every word. Loyalties demanded by families, communities, movements, political parties and nations make us conform and acquiesce. Without dissent, we become slaves or collaborators.

I have never kept family or community secrets. None of us should. I told them about my feckless father, the violence I suffered from two male members of my family, both dead. People looked uneasy. Then I got to the secrets and lies that protected the groomers. That struck a chord. I could see the audience turning, coming round to my point of view.

There were a few young Muslims listening. They agreed with me and spoke to me later with feeling about how important it was to fight the gangs. Fleet needs to know that most British Muslims today are on her side. We want these evil rapists caught, jailed and deported. As she says, justice must be delivered, “for victims and survivors who have been denied it too long”.