Inside the SICK Grooming Scandal

Immigration, the New Elite and the Sexual Exploitation of Children

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Last week, I went to the University of Oxford to join a debate on immigration. It was part of the University’s efforts to promote free speech by discussing “difficult topics”, in response to the Higher Education Free Speech Act which I helped usher in. Britain’s universities now have a legal duty to promote free speech and so I was glad to support Oxford in its effort to do exactly this. Contrary to what critics of the new law argue, the fact these debates are now taking place shows it is producing visible and healthy cultural change in universities. We should all welcome this.

Now onto the debate.

The question was ‘Should there be more or less migration to the UK’. Enver Solomon from the Refugee Council and Krista Verver from St Antony’s College argued there should be more immigration. Rispah Odanga and I argued for less. We each had four minutes to set out our case. Here was mine.

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I said mass immigration is now being used to prop-up Britain’s broken economy and has disproportionately negative effects on working-class, non-graduate, and less skilled people who live outside London and the university towns, like Oxford. I said an alliance of big business and the new elite have now become addicted to importing cheap migrant workers from abroad —whether to keep their costs low and profits high, to hoover up what few benefits there are for themselves, or to signal their ‘luxury beliefs’ and feelings of moral righteousness to others.

I said mass immigration, like highly diverse societies more generally, erodes social trust, leads people to hunker down from others, reduces public support for welfare, undermines perceptions of democratic legitimacy, and fuels national populism.

I said that for the vast majority of Brits out there, beyond Oxford and Cambridge, this debate was actually not ‘difficult’ at all. They know exactly what they think and want. They want net migration lowered, ideally to around 50,000-100,000 a year, rather than the current 600,000 a year.

And they want a ‘high-skilled’ migration policy to deliver exactly that —not low-skilled workers from Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere who enter on salaries as low as £23,000, if not lower, and have been shown to be a net economic cost to the country.

And I said mass migration is now, very clearly, exacerbating other serious problems in the country, like our escalating national housing crisis. This is best reflected in the fact that while we built 180,000 houses last year we now need to build more than twice that, every year, just to keep up with demand from migration. Mass migration is also driving up private rents and dominating social housing, where working-class Brits and young professionals are often now pushed out altogether.

For all these reasons and more, I said we should dramatically lower migration and push for a five-year freeze to allow Britain to absorb the the mass migration we have seen during the last twenty years, strengthen our social fabric and ensure we do not end up living in an atomised, fragmented, and increasingly polarised society.

A poll of the audience was taken before and after the debate. Before the debate, the Oxford audience, unsurprisingly, voted 76% to 24% in favour of ‘more immigration’. Such support is unsurprising when your only real experience of migration is high-skilled international PhD students and professionals who congregate in university towns. After the debate, the audience voted 72% to 28% in favour of more migration. So, there was a slight swing toward our side which, naturally, I took as victory.

But what really surprised me during the debate —what I found truly shocking—was the reaction to what happened when I mentioned one specific issue.

During the question and answer session, one student raised her hand and asked me if I could name one negative effect of immigration and multiculturalism.

I looked at her and without any hesitation said —the organised sexual exploitation of young, white, working-class girls. Suffice to say it caused a strong reaction in the room with more than a few people later insisting I was wrong.

But was I?

Here’s what happened next and why my critics at Oxford are wrong.

Why did I mention the issue at all, you might ask?

Because, to be honest, I think it has been —and still is— one of the most disgraceful and darkest episodes in recent British history.

For readers who might not know about the ‘grooming scandal’, we are talking about tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of children being systematically raped and abused by organised gangs of men while people in power, the very people charged with protecting these children, turned a blind eye.

If you want a sense of the scale of the scandal, here, for example, is what Alexis Jay wrote in her independent report on just one northern town in England, published in 2014, which concluded that at least 1,400 children had been sexually exploited:

“It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators”.

And here’s journalist Ed West describing what happened in the town of Telford, in Shropshire, where children experienced rape and abuse on an industrial scale:

“Here, in a town of 140,000 or so people, some 1,000 young girls were systematically raped and sexually abused by gangs of men over a number of years — and this figure has been described as ‘tame’ by a witness to a recent inquiry. The perpetrators were mostly Pakistani men, the victims were overwhelmingly poor, white and English. The girls, as young as 11 or 12, were given drink and drugs, gang raped and passed around, and threatened if they told the police. Countless such testimonies were confirmed by the authorities, and investigations here reported quite extreme and unprintable forms of sexual abuse. In this town seven men went to jail, although five were given relatively short sentences and are most likely out again. The strangest thing about this story is that this was happening in dozens of cities across England over the course of two decades before it became a national story. As many as 10,000 girls were raped in this way, and countless people in positions of authority, in children’s services and police, knew about it.”

It is, in short, child rape on a mass industrial scale which, as others note, simply “has no other comparison in 21st century Britain”. And while we know there have been at least 1,500 victims in Rotherham, 1,000 in Telford, and nearly 500 in Rochdale, there will be thousands more we simply don’t know about.

But what has been almost as troubling as the scandal itself is the reaction to it —especially among the new elite who dominate the institutions. When I mentioned the scandal in Oxford, the reaction was striking. Several people, including senior members of staff, looked at me in disbelief or shook their heads, registering their disapproval that I had even mentioned it at all. Others took the microphone during the question and answer session to claim I was ‘mispresenting the data’.

Citing a Home Office report, published in 2020, one member of the audience claimed most perpetrators are not, as I suggested, members of a minority group but “white people”. People surrounding the speaker nodded their heads in agreement.

The same claim was also made at the time of that report’s release, by left-leaning academics who argued it was unfair to target any specific group and left-leaning journalists, some of whom said the report “concluded [the] majority of child sexual abuse gangs are made up of white men under [the] age of 30”.

But this is wrong. The people who peddle this nonsense are wrong. And the people who criticised me at the Oxford debate are wrong. Let me explain why.

For a start, this is not what the Home Office report says at all. After reviewing all the available evidence it states clearly that in the most high profile cases of organised grooming convictions ‘mainly involved men of Pakistani ethnicity’.

Furthermore, nationally, across Britain, it concludes data on the scandal is so flawed and limited that little can be said about the link between ethnicity and this type of crime. It is certainly not the case, as my critics suggest, that whites are more likely than other groups to engage in group-based grooming.

As the most comprehensive inquiry notes, the frustrating reality is that data on the ethnicity of perpetrators is often lacking. While the most high-profile prosecutions ‘have involved groups of men from minority ethnic communities … poor or non-existent data collection makes it impossible to know whether any particular ethnic group is over-represented as perpetrators of child sexual exploitation by networks’.

Furthermore, this glaring and shameful lack of data, transparency and information about the true scale and scope of the scandal is not helped by how ideological concerns have been consistently prioritised above the need to protect vulnerable children —as I encountered at Oxford.

Civil servants, as we now know, fell over themselves to try and block the release of data about the scandal. Local councils sought to block the release of presentations because of fears of being called ‘racist’. Teachers in Telford were told they were being ‘racist’ if they shared fears about the scandal. Elsewhere, Pakistani-British policemen and councillors conspired to suppress reports about it. And some reports relied on far-left academics who, quite clearly, downplayed cultural factors.

As the most comprehensive independent inquiry concluded last year, there has simply been ‘a widespread failure … to record the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims of child sexual exploitation’, possibly due to ‘political correctness’.

Either way, despite these problems, the suggestion in the Home Office report —that while whites make up the largest group of offenders (because they are the largest group in Britain), Asian men, usually of Pakistani heritage, are consistently and heavily over-represented— has since been confirmed in a series of detailed studies.

Journalist Andrew Norfolk was the first to draw attention to the scandal, in 2011, writing about how girls as young as 12 had had abortions as a result of abuse while one girl, aged only 13, appeared to have been raped more than 50 times.

Writing in in The Times, in 2011, he noted that in 17 trials held between 1997 and 2011 across 13 towns, 53 of the 56 offenders were described as Asian, of which 50 were Muslim and most were members of the British Pakistani community.

More detailed investigations followed and they tell a remarkably consistent story.

In towns like Rotherham, where this problem has been endemic, social workers admitted that while most perpetrators were ‘Asian men’, data on ethnicity was deliberately excluded from presentations because it was considered controversial.

When it was included, as in a series of reports between 2011 and 2015, it showed, clearly, that Asian men, usually of Pakistani heritage, were consistently over-represented as abusers —even if they were not the majority of abusers.

In 2015, a report by Louise Casey likewise concluded that Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) ‘concerned a majority of white, female, adolescent or teenage victims and a majority of Pakistani heritage adult male perpetrators’. It noted:

“The predominant involvement of Pakistani heritage men was certainly the view of all those who Inspectors spoke to who had been close to operational work around street grooming and CSE in Rotherham in the previous 15 years … perpetrators were usually described as being Pakistani men. This was a matter of fact”.

Professor Alexis Jay, in her report in 2014, similarly concluded most perpetrators of organised grooming “were of Pakistani heritage”. Police in Rochdale also identified the men convicted at a trial as being “mainly British Pakistani”.

Slightly later, an independent review in the town of Telford concluded abusers were mainly males of ‘southern Asian heritage’. And, as in Rotherham, it noted efforts to explore the scandal and a problem with “Pakistani youths” had been shut down due to accusations of it being considered “racist”. The report noted:

“…on the papers disclosed by key stakeholders, it is an undeniable fact that a high proportion of those cases involved perpetrators that were described by victims/survivors and others as being “Asian” or, often, “Pakistani” … the evidence plainly shows that the majority of CSE suspects in Telford during my Terms of Reference were men of southern Asian heritage”.

Even in Oxfordshire, where I found people rushing to downplay or refute these claims, a serious case review, in 2015, found as many as 373 children had been targeted over 16 years and called for research into why a significant proportion of people convicted in these kind of cases are of “Pakistani and/or Muslim heritage”.

Then, in 2020, academics Kish Bhatti-Sinclair and Charles Sutcliffe published an academic paper which examined 73 trials covering 44 towns and 498 accused. Analysing the names of accusers, they found 83% of the people prosecuted for ‘group localised child sexual exploitation’ were Muslim:

“A regression analysis found that both the Muslim and the Pakistani proportions of the local population are powerful variables in explaining the level of GLCSE [group localised child sexual exploitation] in an area. The proportion of the local population of Pakistani origin is more powerful in explaining the level of GLCSE than the Muslim proportion, suggesting that, irrespective of their names, most of the defendants are of Pakistani origin.”

The profile of perpetrators, they suggest, might have something to do with the fact most British Pakistanis come from Mirpur, a rural, deprived and ultra-conservative region in Kashmir, where caste or biradari networks encourage communal crime and shame and honour codes incentivise those networks to defend perpetrators.

It’s also worth pointing out survivors of the scandal also highlight these cultural factors, noting how perpetrators routinely contrasted “good and pure” Muslim girls in their communities with white girls who “dress like slags” and “deserve to be gang-raped. One even quoted scriptures from the Quran as he beat her:

“As a teenager, I was taken to various houses and flats above takeaways in the north of England, to be beaten, tortured and raped over 100 times. I was called a “white slag” and “white c***” as they beat me … 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”. They said I had to “obey” or be beaten.

The blunt reality is that for much of the last twenty years nobody took these voices or the scandal seriously. Nobody wanted to do anything about it because it clashed with strengthening taboos around racism and, as I saw in Oxford, undermined the liberal progressive worldview which dominates the elite institutions.

One big reason why, even now, people struggle to talk about the grooming scandal is because it turns on its head the liberal progressive belief system which views all minorities as virtuous, the majority as oppressors and white graduate liberals, like those in Oxford, as the ‘saviours’ of those oppressed minorities.

The grooming scandal paints a very different picture of modern Britain —a place where members of a minority group oppress and exploit children from the majority, and where white liberals clearly have no interest in coming to save them.

From Rotherham to Telford, Oldham to Rochdale, Oxford to Peterborough, it has been the same story —social workers, councillors, teachers, politicians, and police ignoring or downplaying the scandal because of fears of being called ‘racist’, because they did not believe it, or because members of their community were implicated.

From one town to the next, the desire to not violate anti-racism taboos, to not be seen as politically correct and to conform to the elite consensus was routinely prioritised above ensuring the safety of children and, ultimately, upholding the law.

And this warped response has also been reflected in our our national conversation and prevailing culture where one journalist after another, one report after another, one institution after another, has consistently sought to ignore, downplay, or simply reframe the scandal so that it fits with the worldview of the new elite.

Typical of this reaction, as Guy Dampier notes, is the fact only one major drama has covered the scandal while when television soap Coronation Street, which is supposed to portray life in northern towns, ventured into it the plotlines involved a white man trying to pimp his white girlfriend and a white boy being groomed by the far-right.

The people who dominate the national conversation, in short, have consistently tried to push the scandal out of the public square, largely because it does not fit with their ideological worldview, or reimagine it so that it does. As Ed West notes:

“… we also need to ask about the role of the media, and the arts world, and the cultural powers who decide whether something is worth caring about. It’s significant that this has been left to GB News, a small and still fringe television channel, to tell the story. It should be on BBC1; this should be regularly discussed on the Today programme. My local arts cinema should be telling me about a new film portraying the scandal.”

But it wasn’t. And I doubt it ever will be.

It has been ignored in the institutions and —as I discovered in Oxford— continues to be denied and dismissed by some of the most highly educated people in the country who are supposed to prioritise evidence and truth about ideology.

Even today, it’s reflected in the glaring lack of calls from researchers, journalists, and others to urgently improve the quality of data on the scandal. Were this about the systematic abuse of children from any minority group in Britain there would be endless, loud and shrill demands for better data, better surveys, more research centres, more transparency, and more. Yet even now the silence is deafening.

Personally, I wasn’t surprised by the reaction in Oxford. It’s what happens when overeducated and insulated elites fall head first into what John McWhorter has called the ‘new religion’ of radical progressivism.

Their instinctive action is to shift attention and blame to the majority, away from minorities. They simply cannot accept anything which violates the sacred claims of the liberal progressive religion, like the fact members of a minority group are involved, and still involved, in the organised, mass rape of young white girls.

But that is exactly what is happening. And were it not for a few brave souls throwing light on it, the likes of Andrew Norfolk, Charlie Peters and Guy Dampier, and Ed West, then the scandal would remain firmly in the shadows.

Thank goodness it isn’t, even if Oxford dons remain in the darkness themselves.

Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 41,000 subscribers across 160 countries, and thousands of paying supporters who make our work possible. Like our stuff? Then help us by becoming a paying supporter and access everything —the full archive, exclusive posts, polling, leave comments, join the debate, get discounts, advance notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent writers who are not afraid to push back against the grain. You can also join our community on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter/X.