What real justice would look like for grooming gang victims

It is always interesting to watch a dam burst. In the past week, as Elon Musk and other prominent Americans discovered the British ‘grooming gang’ scandal, British politics has suddenly had to face up to something it has spent a quarter of a century trying to ignore. One would hope that the claim that thousands of underage girls had been gang-raped by thousands of men in cities across the country would be a subject of profound concern for our politicians. Who did this? Why? How can we help the victims and prevent any reoccurrence?

But no society asks questions to which it does not want an answer. The language used about this mass crime has been coyly euphemistic. Take ‘grooming’. Can you say that the girl in Oxford who was repeatedly drugged and raped by men who threatened to kill her and branded her buttocks with ‘M’ for ‘Mohammed’ was merely ‘groomed’?

And what of ‘Asian’? Did these towns see an outbreak of Japanese men prowling our cities for what former home secretary Jack Straw described as the ‘easy meat’ of white working-class girls? No such culprits have come to light. 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.

A few brave politicians, such as Ann Cryer, the former Labour MP for Keighley, have spent years trying to bring attention to this scandal. She was rewarded with insults, opprobrium (‘Islamophobe’, ‘racist’) and even needed police protection. When Sarah Champion, shadow minister for women and equalities under Jeremy Corbyn, spoke out for victims in her constituency, ‘anti-racism’ charities claimed that in doing so she had caused an ‘increase in verbal and physical racist abuse’.