Elon Musk’s false and hysterical denunciations on “grooming gangs” whose lessons, if they have largely been learned, nevertheless raise questions about the errors of English multiculturalism. Mistakes that increasingly fuel far-right populism.
Let us first recall the extraordinary events which shook the United Kingdom in the early 2010s. In 2003, Ann Cryer, Labor MP for Keighley in West Yorkshire, sounded the alarm. Alerted by frightened parents, she denounced the actions of men of Pakistani origin outside two local schools. These target girls aged 12-14, white and working class. Their modus operandi is always the same. They flatter young teenage girls, give them gifts, take them for rides in sports cars, and little by little lead them into alcohol and drugs. Then they become their “boyfriend” before forcing them to have sex with their “friends”, sometimes 25 men in the same evening.
This is called “grooming”, a euphemism for a process of domination and emotional manipulation over a vulnerable person with the aim of their submission and sexual exploitation. In France, we would talk about aggravated pimping and a pedophile network. MP Ann Cryer contacted the local police and minor protection services but her repeated reports were not followed up. Worse, she has to secure her home and her permanent offices following threats: she is called racist and Islamophobic, and the left wing of her own party accuses her of endangering “cultural cohesion” of his constituency. A shame.
It will take an investigative journalist, Andrew Norfolk of the daily The Timesbegins to investigate so that the truth comes to light. “I’ll be honest, I honestly wish this story wasn’t true,” he says today. “It made me terribly uncomfortable. The suggestion that ethnic minority men were committing sex crimes against white children was inevitably going to fuel the fantasies of the far right.” A careful investigation follows. Norfolk links different cases judged here and there in the north of England. The victim is always between 12 and 15 years old, the modus operandi is the same and the criminals of these gang rapes are almost all of Pakistani origin. But this last element is Andrew Norfolk who discovers it because the identity of the criminals is rarely communicated by the police.
Wall of silence
After three months of consulting court records, Norfolk discovered that between 1997 and 2010, 17 cases of grooming and sexual abuse in 13 different towns in the north of England were brought to trial and of the 56 men found guilty, 53 are Muslims of Pakistani origin. Norfolk asks to speak to the local police, social services and the Home Office: all refuse to answer him. Even the children’s charity Barnardo’s does not consent to receiving it. It is the victims and families who will tell their stories to Andrew Norfolk. On January 5, 2011, The Times finally reveals the affair and denounces the “conspiracy of silence”. The scandalized public reaction was immediate and David Cameron’s conservative government ordered a public inquiry. Entrusted to Alexis Jay, Social Assistance inspector, her conclusions delivered in August 2014 had the effect of a bombshell. Between 1997 and 2013, in the town of Rotherham in Yorkshire alone, 1,400 minors aged 11 to 15, white and working class, were all victims of a pedophile ring organized by men, the vast majority of whom were male. Pakistani origin. Asked why the local authorities did not want to listen to the victims whose complaints and statements were accumulating in their drawers, the report points to the fear of being perceived as racist and Islamophobic.
On the judicial side, lessons have been learned. “It took three years but the results are there,” says Andrew Norfolk. The various authorities, from the police to the courts, have coordinated their efforts and undertaken specific training within their staff to detect cases of sexual abuse against children, both within families, institutions, but also in cases of organized gangs. The number of prosecutions has increased significantly. Keir Starmer, then Attorney General, has nothing to reproach himself for, contrary to Elon Musk’s insinuations about identify administrative directives that prevent more culprits from being prosecuted, and convictions begin to come in, many more. Keir Starmer’s deputy in charge of the north of England, Nazir Afzal, a British man of Pakistani origin, also plays a crucial role. He then says he is well placed to understand both the deeply patriarchal culture of the culprits but also the failure of local authorities keen not to appear Islamophobic.
Local Sharia Councils
There remains one question that no one has dared to look into, says Andrew Norfolk today: “the reason for the existence” of these ethnic “grooming gangs”. According to him, as long as we do not take into consideration the religious culture of these pedophile pimps, the action of the hundred sharia councils in the United Kingdom and their impact on gender relations, and the existence of forced and inter-family marriages within these communities, we will not be able to address the problem at the root. And as long as this effort is not made, the far right, from Nigel Farage to activist Tommy Robinson and his support Elon Musk, will rush into the breach.
Little known fact in France, the United Kingdom has more than a hundred “local sharia councils”, informal Islamic courts authorized in 1982 by the government of Margaret Thatcher in order, as the Iron Lady will say, to ” allow the Muslim community to administer its own affairs.” Officially, they are not courts but, in reality, legal arbitrations can be made there, particularly in matters of divorce and inheritance, two areas in which the rights of women and girls are widely violated. These arbitrations replace family law for all those who are married only religiously, as is the case for many Muslims. Unlike France, where only civil marriage is valid, across the Channel, religious marriage has the same legal value. The husband can divorce with a few words spoken before these Islamic authorities, while the wife who requests the divorce must appear several times before her judges and pay them for their services. The divorcee often loses custody of her children and receives no pension.
Another area of Islamic jurisprudence: inheritance. When a father dies and his property is passed on, his daughters will receive half as much as their brothers. The existence of these case laws tolerated by public authorities nourishes a patriarchal culture within these communities, a culture that the British police often choose to “respect”, out of pure cultural relativism. For example, and as star BBC journalist Samira Ahmed denounced in 2014, local authorities in the United Kingdom often go through the self-proclaimed representatives of the Pakistani community to inquire about the fate of its female members instead of contacting them. directly.
“There is a small minority of Pakistani men who believe that white girls are legitimate targets,” said former Conservative minister Sayeeda Warsi, who grew up in the Pakistani community in Yorkshire. And continued: “For them, women are second-class citizens and probably white women are even third-class citizens. We will not be able to solve the problem if we are not ready to face the facts .” She is one of the rare voices to speak so clearly.
For columnist Matthew Syed, whose mother is Welsh and whose father is Pakistani, “public authorities have failed in their mission by letting ethnic minorities and clans live in isolation instead of integrating into the national community.” And the journalist asks the question: “what are the consequences of our cowardice, and of morality sacrificed on the altar of multicultural utopia? The destruction of common sense. This is how proto-fascists like Tommy Robinson, helped by Elon Musk, become the idols of the right […] while ultra-progressive one-upmanship provides even more ammunition for demagogues. An increasingly vicious circle.”
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