It’s the biggest crime—and cover-up—in British history. And most people, at least until recently, haven’t even heard of it.
Thousands of young girls, mostly children, were systematically groomed and raped by immigrant gangs across the UK over a period of decades. Police turned the girls away. Detectives were discouraged from investigating. Politicians and prosecutors did their best to sweep it under the rug. Journalists skipped the biggest story of their lives. A culture of silence enveloped the United Kingdom. Why?
Today, we talk to two women who spoke out years ago about what was happening while nearly everyone looked the other way: the British feminist and author Julie Bindel, and the author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Both took tremendous risks in highlighting the story while the legacy press largely looked away. Bindel is the author, most recently, of Feminism for Women and writes a popular Substack column. Hirsi Ali, a Free Press contributor, is the author of numerous books on radical Islam, including Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, which helped bring attention to the grooming gangs scandal in 2021.
Julie and Ayaan explain today what happened, how these rapes and murders were covered up in the name of preserving “social harmony,” how it’s still happening, why Elon Musk is suddenly tweeting furiously about it, and how Britain’s ruling class is being forced to reckon with a scandal it had, until recently, successfully ignored.
It’s a story about “tolerance” run amok, and how a civilized country can convince itself to accept the most uncivilized crimes imaginable.
Click below to listen to the podcast, or scroll down for an edited transcript of our conversation.
On the roots of what happened and why:
Bari Weiss: My understanding is that gangs of men, mostly of Pakistani Muslim origin, raped and tortured mostly working-class white girls in as many as 50 cities across the UK. And a 2014 inquiry estimated that in Rotherham alone, 1,400 girls had been serially raped. Does that check out?
Julie Bindel: It does check out. If you give perpetrators a message that if they rape a child, the child is the one more likely to be criminalized than him, and if you give society a message that you can buy a child for sex and nothing will ever happen to you because it’s so normalized through pornography and through other cultural signifiers, then it’s not surprising that this is happening. And it was happening in these particular towns with these particular gangs, and it was monetized, but it really was nothing new. It was just becoming so obvious and the police wanted nothing to do with it.
BW: I think this is maybe a place where the two of you might see it a little bit differently. Julie, you see things from a very consistent feminist perspective—that this is the nature of men. This is the kind of crimes that men in groups commit. And we shouldn’t be surprised by it. But Ayaan, I wonder if you disagree about that.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I don’t know if I would call it disagreement. I would say I have a different perspective obviously because of my background. I grew up a Muslim. I lived in Muslim countries and I come at the problem differently. And around 2003, I was publicizing the abuse of Muslim women by Muslim men in the Netherlands. One anecdote I remember from a well-known Dutch publicist was when he sat me down and he said, “You are trying to draw attention to abuse against Muslim women. Let me tell you about the middle classes in Europe: They’re indifferent.” And I remember asking him if they will be indifferent if European women are abused? And he said, “No, if there’s a blonde girl on national television and she’s been sexually abused by one of these, there’ll be huge outrage. The feminists will not stand for it.”
Unfortunately, fast-forward to around 2013, all the messages I’m getting are about these grooming gangs in Britain—young men chasing women, raping them. I started diving into the subject, and what I discover, unfortunately, is the systematic sexual abuse of white working-class girls and women by men, mostly Muslim. And what the British have come to call grooming gangs—that is, sexual and the systematic sexual abuse of white working-class girls and women by men, mostly Muslim—was dismissed as “they’re slags.” I’ve heard the phrase “white trash” over and over again. And so there’s a class element to this. And the same reasoning that was applied to look away from the abuse of Muslim women was also applied to the abuse against these white girls—not just by men in power, but by feminists, mostly by feminists.
I think it’s very important to get all of these perspectives on the table to get a full picture. I’m coming at this by saying, it’s very important to understand not just why the social workers were silent, why the police were silent, why politicians are silent, but let’s also do the other side. Why is it that these men are committing these crimes in this way? What is wrong with the families and the wider community of these men? Why do they tolerate it against their own women and then against women that they don’t think of as women? And we have to answer that question.
And once you go down that path, then you open the door to the issues of immigration, the failure of integration, the role of Islam in this. And the one key question that Europeans simply don’t want to talk about is: What do we do about it?
On how fear and cowardice resulted in a cover-up:
AHA: There are different layers of fear. There is the naked threat of “If you do anything about this issue, we will come and rape you, burn you, kill you.” And these people do act on these threats. I’ve been living with protection for a very long time. I know exactly what I’m talking about. And so the threat from the immigrant Muslim men and their families—whether it is Islamist-driven or tribal-driven or whatever it is—is absolutely key.
There’s another layer of fear which is more sinister, which is that some of the politicians have come to depend on the vote of those immigrants. And so the white working classes numerically are no longer important to them. They don’t serve them. So if you want to keep their votes—and this is not just the Labour Party, even for the Tory Party—from those constituencies, then they had to look away from these problems.
And then some people have taken money or they’ve taken sexual favors or in some other way compromised. And so you have different people who are afraid for different reasons. And then, of course, there is this giant progressive media on the other side of the Atlantic in Europe that is committed to this model of diversity, of bringing in more immigration. So the media itself—the BBC in the UK, Sky News, Channel Four, the national newspapers—many of them also are in this ideological conspiracy to look away from these problems. And they have their own reasons and their own fears. And I think that whole box has to be opened.
JB: We also have to look at moral cowardice. When I first published my investigation into the grooming gangs in 2007, The Guardian wouldn’t run it. I’d asked them repeatedly, and the editor said that we would be seen as racist, despite the fact that she knew I’m a feminist on the left, and we had been concerned about child sexual abuse committed by perpetrators of all stripes. But even so, there was this cowardice. And when I took it to The Sunday Times, the first thing that happened that same day was that my name was added to Islamophobia Watch, a website that had been set up by two men—white men on the hard left—who decided that any criticism of Islam or Islamists was Islamophobic. (I didn’t care that I was on that watch list. In fact, I was quite proud of it because I thought, Good, I’ve made a mark. There were lots of Muslim women from different countries—living, or who’d escaped living, under Islamic rule—who were saying “thank you” for publishing this.)
All of the white feminists that I knew at the time in the media that were fighting male violence were also scared to publish it. In fact, some of them came up to me at media events and they didn’t say “brave,” they said it was “risky.” I was absolutely sickened and appalled. And that cowardice remains today.
BW: One of the more disturbing things that I’ve read in the past few days is this quote by a former Labour MP from Rochdale, Simon Danczuk, in one of these cities that were victimized by these gangs. He says that he was warned by top leaders in his party not to highlight who the perpetrators were: “What surprised me more than anything is that I had senior politicians tell me not to mention the ethnicity or religious bias of those perpetrators. They said it would affect the Labour vote. It was quite clear. They were quite clear about that.” How did the identity of the perpetrators here create a kind of code of silence around politicians’ ability to talk about it?
AHA: So if you go back a little bit in time, in the early 2000, late 1990s, there were very hot debates and discussions on what sort of societies we are now in Europe. And what we had was this classical model where all individuals were equal before the law. So if you are a perpetrator of any crime, you would be treated absolutely like everyone else. But then we had this Muslim minority that we were trying to assimilate or coexist with or accommodate and there was a whole new school of thought: this multiculturalism model.
So when you say “community relations,” that is one of the centerpieces of multiculturalism, which is instead of being this Western society—which was racist, Eurocentric, oppressor/oppressed—the multicultural model says, “Minorities are going to be given exceptions and exemptions.”