By Millie Collins
The racist myth of ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ is no longer just being fuelled by the far right and tabloid press. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has once again U-turned, contradicting his own opinion from back in January where he accused anyone calling for a national enquiry to be ‘jumping on a bandwagon’ and ‘amplifying’ the demands of the far right.
Now Starmer has done just that, capitulating to the racists and letting them dictate policy, turning victims into pawns in a political tug of war.
In January Home Secretary Yvette Cooper commissioned a ‘rapid audit’ into
Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSEA) after significant pressure from the Tories, media, and Tommy Robinson. The focus of Baroness Lousie Casey’s audit was to look at ‘ethnicity data and demographics of gangs’.
Announcing the report to the commons, Cooper was clear that she ‘specifically’ asked Casey to also examine the ‘cultural and social drivers’ behind CSEA, but restricted this to examining data from three police forces (Greater Manchester, West and South Yorkshire).
Cooper said these areas ‘identify clear evidence of over representation amongst suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men’. So the conclusion was built in from the start.
Failing the victims
Among several vague recommendations for tighter policing and data collection, as well as new laws to protect children and support victims, the Home Secretary called for a new national inquiry to ‘hold institutions accountable for past failures’.
As part of the national inquiry the government is commissioning ‘new research into the cultural and social drivers of child sexual exploitation, misogyny and violence against women and girls’.
In February, 10 members of an exclusively white grooming gang operating in Bolton were convicted of rape and engaging in sexual activity with a child. There has been virtually no media reporting on this compared to the extensive coverage of incidents of Muslim grooming gangs. Cooper has completely ignored it.
Cooper clearly expects the new national enquiry to focus on offences committed by South Asian men. This does nothing but further push the racist narrative, while failing to act on the recommendations of the previous national inquiry, which focused on the failures of safeguarding and the treatment of victims, and which made it clear that CSEA is not a ‘Muslim problem’.
Child sexual exploitation (CSE) is a subcategory of child sexual abuse. It differentiates abuse, based on whether the perpetrators know each other. But the relentless focus on ‘grooming gangs’ and CSE is letting down the vast majority of child abuse victims who suffer in silence.
By obsessing over cases of organised exploitation, the state is deliberately turning a blind eye to the ugly reality that most CSEA happens in homes, schools and churches by relatives, teachers and clergy. It distracts from the fact that 90% of CSEA is committed by someone the child knows. But this doesn’t fit the racist narrative that the government is pushing.
The Hydrant programme, set up to coordinate police response to non-recent child sexual abuse, collected data from 44 forces across England and Wales in response to Alexix Jay’s 2022 inquiry.
Where the data included ethnicity, it shows that 83% of all reported cases of CSEA were committed by people of white ethnicity and 7% committed by people of South Asian ethnicity. Linked research has shown ‘group-based CSE offenders are most commonly white’, despite a bias in police reporting. The data speaks for itself.
Caving in to the right
The UK government’s latest proposal for an inquiry into ‘grooming gangs’ is a thinly veiled racist witch-hunt, designed to scapegoat Muslim and South Asian communities while ignoring systemic failures in protecting vulnerable children. By focusing exclusively on crimes committed by men of colour, this reactionary narrative reinforces Islamophobic stereotypes.
The government, aided by the racist media, is cynically exploiting this issue to fuel division and justify draconian policing of minority communities, rather than addressing the root causes of abuse—poverty, austerity and a broken social care system.
This is not about justice for victims; it’s about advancing a racist law-and-order agenda that criminalises oppressed communities, while letting the ruling class off the hook. Workers must reject this divisive propaganda and fight for a united, class-based response to child exploitation, one that targets the capitalist state and its oppressive machinery, not marginalised groups.
