LONDON — A horrendous picture of government knowledge of — and refusal to act on — the abuse of girls has engendered a discussion among working people.
Eight men from Rochdale, near Manchester, are on trial for 56 sexual offenses, including what is called “grooming,” sexually exploiting and raping two 13-year-old girls between 2001 and 2006. The men, described in the press as Asians, deny the allegations.
“Grooming” is a woke term used to cover up the reality of what occurred — the pimping, sexual abuse and rape of children.
The case is the latest in a series of trials held in Rotherham, Telford and elsewhere that have brought to light details of the systematic rape of young girls over two decades by gangs of men largely of Pakistani descent. The trials, and subsequent government-commissioned inquiries, also shed light on the refusal of cops, social workers and officials to investigate repeated complaints of the abuse, denying the children involved basic protection.
One victim, Emily Vaughn, who is now in her 30s, said she was abused by a gang from the age of 14 and trafficked to Telford, Blackpool and within Wales, where she was from, and was raped “almost every single day.” Seven men were jailed in 2012 for running a child prostitution ring in Telford involving more than 100 girls between 2007 and 2009.
Three British-Pakistani men were handed life sentences in Oxford in 2020. In a previous case, the judge described how one of the three prepared the child “for gang anal rape by using a pump…[and] subjected her to a gang rape by five or six men. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet.”
Many times the victims reported what had happened to the police — only to be turned away.
Amber, a young woman from Rochdale, was targeted when she was 14 by a gang who plied girls with drugs and alcohol, and then raped and prostituted them between 2008 and 2010. She was threatened at gunpoint by a man she subsequently identified to the police, who did nothing. “They weren’t bothered,” she told the Guardian in 2022. “They don’t give a f–k when you’re not from a wealthy background.”
In Bradford, a 13-year-old girl placed in a residential care home run by the local municipal council in 2002 told social workers she had been assaulted and raped by a group of older men, one of whom she called her “boyfriend.” When she was 15, the girl told social workers she had converted to Islam and married the “boyfriend” in a Sharia-law ceremony. Despite this brutal history, the social worker responsible recommended she be allowed to live with the man and his family, where she was then subjected to further abuse.
Nine men were eventually jailed for the abuse of the young woman, as well as of other girls who had been placed into the council’s care.
An inquiry was commissioned by the Rotherham Borough Council and the results published in 2014. It found that 1,400 children in that city alone were sexually abused between 1997 and 2013 by gangs of predominantly British-Pakistani men. The men would refer to their victims as “white whores.”
The refusal to investigate complaints about the abuse was often done under the guise that responding would be “Islamophobic.” An inquiry in Manchester found that cops held back from investigating reported sexual assaults on children, claiming they didn’t want to “upset race relations.”
These kind of woke ideas are common on the left of capitalist politics. In 2018 an all-party parliamentary committee report stated that “age-old stereotypes” about “Asian grooming gangs” would “heighten the vulnerability of Muslims to hate crimes.”
But acknowledging the fact that gangs of men of mostly Pakistani descent did carry out horrendous crimes, with authorities looking the other way, doesn’t mean that child abuse isn’t also perpetrated by people of other nationalities and religions. Nor does it get in the way of fighting anti-Muslim prejudice and discrimination.
“Child abuse, sexual abuse and rape are endemic under capitalism,” Pamela Holmes, a member of the Communist League, told participants at a Militant Labour Forum here Jan. 18, “and totally unacceptable to working people.”
She explained that the way government officials responded, by refusing to take action because it would be “racist,” underscored their class contempt for the victims. The fight to end child abuse, she said, was bound up with the fight for women’s emancipation, something that will be advanced only in the course of a struggle by the working class to take power into its own hands and put an end to capitalist exploitation.