By Professor Aisha K. Gill*
A decade-old scandal involving the grooming, trafficking and abuse of young girls has gained renewed media attention following incendiary comments from US-based tech billionaire Elon Musk.
In 2014, a report by Professor Alexis Jay estimated that 1,400 girls had been sexually exploited in Rotherham, Rochdale and Oldham by gangs of mostly Pakistani men. Ostensibly fearing accusations of racism, authorities hesitated to address the ethnic dimension of the crimes. At the same time, local officials deemed the abuse to be consensual sexual activity, consequently leaving women and girls with no support. In 2022, Jay, as chair of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse (IICSA), released a subsequent report drawing on the experiences of 7,300 victims and survivors and offering twenty recommendations for reforms to tackle child sexual abuse. These are yet to be implemented.
In a series of recent posts on X, Musk accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of failing to address these crimes during his tenure as the UK’s top prosecutor, labelling him “complicit in the rape of Britain” and called for his resignation. He also accused UK Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips of being a “rape genocide apologist” and called for her imprisonment – following statements from Phillips, along with Professor Jay, that a government inquiry into these cases is unnecessary and would only delay action being taken to help victims and survivors.
Musk’s thinking and language is consistent with a broader political narrative pushed by the far right in the UK: that Britain, and particularly white girls, need ‘saving’ from Muslim men, and that white men must be their saviours. In misogynist and Islamophobic terms, he is ascribing blame to individuals rather than addressing the underlying systemic failures that have contributed to the endemic problem of child sexual abuse in the UK. By shifting the focus away from victims and the institutions that let them down, Musk’s inflammatory rhetoric does little more than incite division and hatred.
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The portrayal of victims
I have researched press reports of the grooming scandal and of UK child sexual abuse cases over the last decade, including in Rochdale. My work reveals that while the media often adopted a sympathetic attitude towards the victims, the statutory agencies involved in these cases did not. In the Rochdale case, many of the professionals who worked with young victims viewed them as having made “lifestyle choices” (Syal, 2013) by freely engaging in sexual activity involving Pakistani men; some labelled the girls, including those as young as 12, “prostitutes”. quoted Survivor Caitlin Spencer (a pseudonym) faced intense interrogation from the police following her disclosure and was refused their protection. Quoted in The Mail Online (Boyle, 2017) she revealed, “For that reason, I never took it further. The police told my mother that I was a known prostitute and to leave me to it, that I’d stop when I was ready”. Caitlin’s experience highlights how those being exploited were viewed by authorities and suggests strongly that class prejudice within the police, rather than ‘political correctness’, lay behind their failure to investigate the offences. It also emphasises the influence of patriarchal conceptions of gender that are evident in Musk’s commentary. Class status for women (and girls) is often mediated through moral demarcations that emphasise respectable sexual behaviour and gender presentation. A woman’s failure to maintain classed and gendered sexual standards often results in her being labelled a “slut” (or, in this case, a “prostitute”).
The media’s sympathetic portrayal of victims was also a double-edged sword. In reporting on the Rochdale cases, its ‘sympathy’ for white victims was balanced by an equal and opposite demonisation of the perpetrators on racialised grounds. By focussing on perpetrators’ ethnic identity as a rationale for the abuse, reports cast South Asian men as dangerous sex offenders and positioned the British state as a reformed patriarchy seeking to rescue and protect white women and girls from deviant and abusive minority ethnic men. The dangers of this are numerous, with the over-identification of South Asian men as sexual predators directly linked to a surge in far-right, Islamophobic and anti-immigrant discourse.
Musk’s commentary encapsulates this tendency perfectly. His recent posts frame the scandal in terms of race and gender, thereby avoiding the ways in which the police and other state agencies failed to properly investigate these cases and support victims. His commentary, like the negative media characterisations of perpetrators over the last decade, has been amplified by social media algorithms, adding fuel to the fire of cultural Islamophobia and severely compromising how South Asian men and communities are perceived by the wider population. Furthermore, giving disproportionate attention to a particular case or group of offenders distracts from the prevalence of child sexual abuse in the UK as a whole. Opportunities to identify and address the majority of cases, in which the perpetrators are more often white men, are lost in polemics over identity politics and white saviour narratives.
Many cases of child sexual abuse are already likely to remain hidden because of the tendency for such crimes to go unreported. Victims are often unlikely to come forward because they fear retribution from the offender, the stigma of sexual abuse, and concerns that they will not be believed and that the legal system will not bring them justice.
Moreover, offenders are often seen as ‘nice guys’ by their friends and colleagues. Many befriend and seduce their victims, taking advantage of their vulnerability. According to the prosecution in the Rochdale cases, the defendants threatened to harm the girls, or their families, should they attempt to flee. Through such intimidation, the men exercised control over the girls who, because of their history of traumatic experiences and difficult home lives, were particularly vulnerable to exploitation.
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Time for action
The government has ceded to pressure and agreed to organise and fund five government-backed local inquiries. Cooper has stated that “effective local inquiries can delve into far more local detail and deliver more locally relevant answers, and change, than a lengthy nationwide inquiry can provide”. In my view, the £5 million announced for funding these locally-led inquiries would be better spent on promoting specialist, preventative, therapeutic provision for the victims of child sexual exploitation. The government needs to set out a timeline regarding its commitment with regard to responding to the evidence contained in the IICSA report and urgently implementing its recommendations. This is critical for both improving the support offered to child and adult survivors of child sexual abuse and also addressing the systemic failures that were exposed by Professor Jay’s 2014 and 2022 reports. For too long, piecemeal, uncoordinated responses have allowed agencies to, both individually and collectively, deny accountability, by blaming ‘cultural sensitivities’ for their actions and failures to act. In reality, what seems to lie at the heart of their inaction is a callous disregard for abused women’s right to protection. Disjointed, dysfunctional practices will continue, even if positive legislative changes are implemented, until effective, consistent training of the police, social workers, health workers, and youth and community workers is provided to educate these groups about the issues faced by children who are at risk of exploitation.
Finally, raising moral outrage online over the issue of child sexual abuse and exploitation while simultaneously perpetrating harmful racial stereotypes serves a cynical agenda – not the victims of these crimes. It uses vulnerable women and girls as a front for igniting racialised violence and undermining the UK’s current administration, and so promoting right-wing policies on immigration and related issues. Musk’s rhetoric should be disavowed in place of action. We all share a collective responsibility to improve our understanding of the cultural specificities and institutional barriers that impede child sexual exploitation disclosure—only then will we be in a position to promote appropriate prevention and support.
Author details
Aisha K. Gill, Ph.D., FRSA CBE is an internationally and nationally acknowledged grassroots gender-based violence activist/researcher with over 20+ years’ experience, focused on Black and minoritized communities’ women and girls’ experiences of forced marriage, rape, policing, sexual violence, child sexual exploitation, FGM/C, and femicidal violence in the name of ‘honour’, which relates to issues around the intersections between law, policy and practice. She is currently Professor of Criminology and Head of Centre for Gender and Violence Research at the University of Bristol. In 2024 she was appointed Board of Trustees of Ashiana Network. [https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/aisha-k-gill | 📧 ak.gill@bristol.ac.uk ]