‘The rape gangs have claimed well over 100,000 victims’

The UK government never wanted to hold an inquiry into the scandal of the grooming gangs. Keir Starmer accused anyone calling for one of jumping on a ‘far right’ bandwagon. So perhaps it is no surprise that the inquiry the PM belatedly launched last year is going nowhere fast. Several victims advising the fledgling inquiry have resigned, accusing the government of yet another cover-up by attempting to sidestep thorny questions about race and ethnicity. The thousands of mostly white working-class girls, who were abused by predominantly Pakistani Muslim gangs, look set to be denied justice once again.

Julie Bindel – journalist and founder of justice for women – has been investigating the rape gangs for decades. She recently appeared on The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss the latest attempted cover-up, the horrifying scale of the abuse and the complicity of Britain’s elites. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. Watch the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: You’ve been writing about the grooming-gang issue for a long time. What’s your overview of where things stand right now?

Julie Bindel: Since the 1980s, I’ve been dealing with the issue of child sexual abuse. I was asking whether it was institutionalised or endemic, and how the authorities and the criminal-justice system have dealt with that. In particular, I looked at the phenomenon of the street-based rape-gang horrors that are otherwise known as the Pakistani grooming gangs.

We all know – or those that are being honest about it do – that this particular group of men, whether they’re Iraqi Muslim or Pakistani Muslim or anything else, are embedded within a very traditional misogynistic culture. They are clannish with their extended families. This enables them to run big drug cartels, as well as cartels of prostituted and sexually abused girls for their own pleasure.

These men are in an absolute prime position to do this, because there are plenty of excuses for authorities not to deal with it. Firstly, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the criminal justice system and public services have never really dealt properly with the issue of abuse against girls – particularly against working-class girls. Secondly, there are so many white liberals within those institutions who are genuinely terrified to be called racist. It will spoil the dinner party atmosphere and it will mean that they have a label on their backs that they do not want. It’s solely about their reputation and convenience.

Regarding the police, however, it’s not that they are terrified of being called racist. What they are really concerned about is that by pointing the finger at men predominantly of a certain background, they might trigger a race riot. They want to avoid mayhem on the streets.

People say it’s complicated. It’s actually not. It’s really straightforward. These are gangs of abusers who have got free rein at the moment, because they’ve tapped into the idiotic progressive left and asked it to defend and support them. This alliance is maintained by throwing out terms such as ‘Islamophobia’, which send white people scrambling to look less racist. This aspect of the problem is quite simple.

That said, it’s not like the police have got a good record in dealing with institutionalised abuse, whether it’s in children’s homes (which many grooming-gang victims are from), or by care-home staff, teachers, Catholic priests, within the BBC – these instances have just been allowed to happen. I think we need to look at that picture as a whole. One of the reasons we have failed the victims of grooming gangs is, first and foremost, because we tend to blame the girls. We will find any excuse to let the perpetrators off the hook.

O’Neill: There’s a tendency to talk about this scandal as if it’s something that happened in the past. But are these gangs really history?

Bindel: Absolutely not. I was utterly furious when Sadiq Khan denied the existence of grooming gangs in London when they’ve been around for as long as I’ve been researching the issue. When he was race-baiting the Conservatives’ Susan Hall at the London Assembly, we all knew what he wanted her to say. He wanted her to specify these perpetrators by race, by ethnicity, by religion. He really is a nasty piece of work. He wanted to discredit her, and he wanted to embarrass anyone who raised the issue going forward.

I think that the police have perhaps disrupted some of the gangs in various towns and cities, but they’ll regroup eventually, because there’s very little consequence for them. They haven’t got the sword of Damocles hanging down on their heads. I think with this cohort of girls in particular, people are choosing not to believe the victims. Worse, they’re actually saying that these girls are responsible. That they egged the men on or were bored of their own potential white boyfriends and wanted to experiment with different men. There is racism involved, but it’s directed towards the girls because the majority are white. They’re called white slags for having sex with brown Muslim men.

O’Neill: How many perpetrators are going unpunished?

Bindel: If you look at our overall national figures for reported rape convictions, it is slightly under one per cent that result in conviction. That’s pretty scary. I’m not suggesting that every single report is accurate. I’m not suggesting that there aren’t sometimes mistakes made or even wilful false reporting, but these cases are very rare. You just have to look at what the complainants go through to understand how extremely rare this is. Every piece of research, including Home Office research, shows how rare it is.

If you look at the figures coming out of Rotherham, there are 1,400 victims that are known of, from over a decade ago. Multiply that at least tenfold. The last thing that we want to do is for people to stop listening to this because of hyperbole and exaggeration, but if you were to take a very conservative estimate, you’re looking at several towns and cities where girls are being abused and targeted by a very similar type of perpetrator. The real number will be well over 100,000 – and that’s a conservative estimate. That is a terrifying number of victims, the vast majority of whom will never see justice. Almost none of them will have counselling or any kind of psychological support. We’re talking about thousands of ruined lives. It is an extraordinary stain on our nation and on the wellbeing of working-class communities.

O’Neill: Do you feel this government will carry out a sufficient inquiry?

Bindel: I don’t rate the government’s record on violence against women and girls at all. It’s long left the working classes behind and the unemployed behind. Labour knows that there’s not much point in schmoozing these people, because many have stopped voting. They don’t have the cultural capital of the Islington set.

I have no faith whatsoever that the Tory Party would be any better. They’ve taken money away from really vital services that address the problem of violence against women and girls. I find myself, for the first time in my entire life, politically homeless. If there was an election tomorrow, I would have to spoil my ballot because I couldn’t vote for any of them.

There are other things I can do though. We mustn’t feel powerless just because we can’t vote for any of these muppets. The inquiry has to go ahead, and it has to be a statutory one, because it’s critical we can compel people to give evidence. If it’s not statutory, then people can just decide if they’re going to be questioned, cross-examined and scrutinised. Councils like Bradford can simply decide to not give over the necessary data or paperwork. We wouldn’t be able to analyse the causes of their failures.

What we can’t do is repeat the mistakes of previous inquiries such as the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which was very broad and not very useful. Victims of these specific grooming-gang crimes were not heard. We need to look at where the evidence is coming from and listen to people with direct experience. We need to look into areas where victims are saying there is a problem, like Bradford. If we don’t do that then the Home Office will, yet again, commission some absolute plonker academics who are more concerned about claiming their anti-racist badges than carrying out real research into the issue. They will inevitably conclude that this has nothing to do with the Pakistani-Muslim community because – as they would put it – the majority of sexual abuses of children are by white perpetrators. Well, guess what? That’s because 70-odd per cent of the country is white!

If what we get is another round of disbelief and disrespect towards the victims, we’re in trouble. These women and girls will simply fade away if the terms of the inquiry are not ironclad. Most of them cannot sustain yet another complete let-down by this government. We’ve got to force the inquiry to happen, and we’ve got to make sure none of the hotspots for grooming-gang activity escape scrutiny this time.

Julie Bindel was talking to Brendan O’Neill. Watch the full conversation below: