From the Macdonald Laurier Institute

By Raheel Raza

Fear of being labelled a racist prevented UK officials from stopping the mass abuse of women by “grooming gangs.” Could the same happen in Canada?

If you asked Canadians what they know about the United Kingdom’s “grooming gangs” the majority would be clueless. So far, the issue has been an exclusively UK based scandal, with limited media coverage.

These so-called “grooming gangs” sexually exploited hundreds of vulnerable young women and girls across the UK for many years before their activities came to public attention in the early 2010s. In essence, because the perpetrators are largely groups of British-Pakistani men, the media, law enforcement, and officials failed in their duty to address or publicize the scandal for fear of being accused of racism. This is a truly tragic result of identity politics on a massive scale.

The victims were mostly female and white (although some Asian girls were also targeted). Many victims were underage, some were homeless or living in state children’s homes. Local social services officials knew many of the girls but stood by as the gangs exploited them – sometimes for years.

Media reports suggested that local law enforcement also knew some of the perpetrators but waited unreasonably long before making arrests and laying charges. Scores of men in different towns have since been arrested, tried and imprisoned for their actions. But hundreds roam free, even today.

Among the worst cases were gangs operating in the northern towns of Rotherham and Rochdale, but many others have been exposed around the country over the last decade-and-a-half: Oldham, Oxford, Telford, Peterborough, and others. Ministers and members of the opposition have acknowledged that similar gangs may still be operating.

The story came to international attention recently, due to intervention by Elon Musk, who tweeted in clear terms about the UK’s problems with racial integration. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is now grappling with the re-emergence of this long-running scandal.

GB News UK produced one of the most comprehensive and detailed exposes through an investigative documentary featuring exclusive interviews with survivors, whistleblowers, and activists. The documentary explains why the police and authorities have allowed such a significant cover up to persist for so long. There is evidence of a massive cover up by people who had infiltrated into social services, councils and law enforcement.

UK Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips refused a request from Oldham City Council to launch a national inquiry into the issue and instead told the council it should mount a local one itself. But thankfully, UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced plans for a nationwide review and five government-backed local inquiries.

British academic Alexis Jay, a professor of social work and a child protection expert, concluded a multi-year public inquiry detailing how an organized gang abused girls as young as 11, trafficking them across the country and even picking them up from children’s care homes in taxis without any effort to hide what they were doing.

Jay found that “1,400 children had been sexually exploited, raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked across other towns, abducted, beaten, and threatened with guns. Children had even been doused in petrol. Girls as young as 11 had been raped. Those reports a decade ago identified a failure to confront Pakistani heritage gangs and a ‘widespread perception’ that they should ‘downplay the ethnic dimensions’ for fear of being seen to be racist.”

Some UK Labour politicians previously said that fear of being labelled racist has created a taboo around saying there is a specific ethnicity of men, of Pakistani heritage, participating in sexual exploitation.

Among them is Sarah Champion, who represents of the areas where grooming gangs operated. She  has campaigned consistently on the issue, and recently called for another national inquiry into grooming gangs, putting more pressure on Prime Minister Starmer.

Champion wrote an op-ed for a tabloid newspaper in which she stated: “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls. There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?”

Champion’s statement caused such an outrage – the Labour Party responded by shunning her – that she had to retract it from her article.

In 2023, then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman made several comments about the ethnicity of abusers in high-profile gangs. She said, “the perpetrators are groups of men, almost all British Pakistani.” She told the BBC the gangs “overwhelmingly” consisted of British Pakistani males.

Reports first surfaced about the groomer gangs more than a decade earlier. In September 2012, journalist Andrew Norfolk, chief investigative reporter for The Times, published an article based on a police report about the extent of the issue. It revealed that networks of mainly British Pakistani men were abusing children in Rotherham “on an unprecedented scale.”

Law authorities failed to prosecute suspects despite police and child protection agencies in Rotherham having had knowledge of these crimes for decades, the newspaper said.

To show that they were engaged, governments and agencies commissioned various reports, but no action was taken. In these reports, the criminals were referred to as “men of Asian heritage”!

Meanwhile Naz Shah, a Labour MP, retweeted, “Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.” She later deleted her retweet and unliked the post.

In 2018, I was invited to the UK to give testimony in the House of Lords about the Sharia debate in Ontario. At the time, there was a rising number of Sharia Councils operating in the UK that were depriving many Muslim women of their rights.

During that visit I met a white woman named Toni Bugle. Bugle is founder of MARIAS – Mothers Against Radical Islam and Sharia. Bugle had been a victim of gang rape and abuse as a child (not by grooming gangs) so she paid close attention to the stories of victims of grooming gangs.

Bugle asked me if I would attend a conference that she set up at the UK Parliament where some of the grooming gang victims would tell their stories. She told me she needed a Muslim woman’s voice because when she tried to expose the stories, she was called a racist, bigot, and Islamophobe.

At Bugle’s conference (which had no media presence) I met some of the rape victims, including Caitlin, Samantha, and Torron. They were scared and insecure and spoke in soft voices, looking around constantly. Some of them showed visible signs of trauma and had bruises on their arms and faces. But they were brave enough to share their stories, which were absolutely horrendous. The shock gave me sleepless nights.

Bugle had also organized a rally outside the British Parliament with the victims and I was happy to join her to amplify the victims’ concerns about the authorities’ failure to stop the abuse.

Bugle told me “I realized that there was a massive issue with Muslim men of predominantly Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnicity targeting predominantly young white working-class girls.” Bugle decided to reach out to the victims to help them and started to hear their stories. She continues to do that to this day:

“I always have my phone near me,” Bugle says, “These young girls can and do call me at anytime… I make myself available. If I had to give a number for how many girls I’ve helped, I would take a guess that via just the phone maybe fifty or sixty and more direct involvement approximately ten or fifteen young women. I have also helped many Muslim women who were facing the trauma of forced marriage and sharia councils – two of which I introduced at the conference.”

Hearing this, I was shocked as to why Muslim organizations in UK (especially women’s groups) did not condemn what was happening to their non-Muslim sisters or take any action? Imagine if this was the reverse and happened to Muslim women? All hell would have broken loose!

Bugle said that she had also been contacted by young girls for support. The first girl who reached out, Caitlin Spencer, eventually wrote a book titled, Please, let me go: the horrific true story of a girl’s life in the hands of sex traffickers.

From the age of 14, traffickers controlled Caitlin, raped her, and repeatedly sold and passed her on to new gangs across the UK. Her abusers were blatant in their attacks, often collecting her from school or home, to be taken to flats they owned, family homes, or hotels booked for the day.

Please, Let Me Go is Caitlin’s shocking story of abuse and survival. She writes, “I was trapped. I’d been raped so many times, abused by hundreds, if not thousands. They could have left every door open, and it would have made no difference. And I always came back – they always brought me back.”

Bugle says, “given that Caitlin still sees her abusers driving their taxis with impunity and that other victims similarly see perpetrators living freely and intimidating them, what will our government do to bring those perpetrators to justice?”

Bugle continues, “I have met girls who have been raped, defecated on, urinated on, had children from their abusers and often those children were taken away from these girls by social services. You can imagine the damage that did was devastating for the whole family.”

Another girl Bugle helped is Sarah, a 15 year old white girl. A journalist for the Daily Mail did a story on Sarah: a grooming gang coerced her to marry a gang member who effectively forced her into sex slavery after abducting her in a Tesco parking lot in an English suburb. Sarah’s captivity lasted for 12 years.

I asked Bugle why they didn’t go to court or the police. She says “sadly they went to the police, who pretty much promised they would deal with what happened – but also made it very clear it would be ‘their word against the men’… The girls were made to feel they were not believed and it led to the girls just giving up… every time they went to the police and nothing was done the girls would often find themselves beaten by the very men they reported.”

Bugle says she saw this same trend, of girls and their families not believed by local authorities, occur over and over. The total failure of social services, law enforcement, teachers, and council officers exacerbated the trauma faced by these victims.

In the past eight years, I’ve observed the changing face of Canada, and the picture is eerily similar to the changes I’ve observed in UK. Every time I returned from a trip to the UK, I worried that with a rise in wokeism, political correctness, and DEI policies, a similar situation of abuse could arise in Canada, and that Canadian leaders would likewise remain silent.

The rise in radical Islamist extremism across Europe and the UK is also happening in Canada, while our politicians and institutions refuse to acknowledge this reality. Radical Islamist extremism is directly connected to the behaviour and attitudes of Islamists. They justify their weaponizing of sexual slavery, disrespect, and dishonouring of non-Muslim women as being in sync with their warped interpretation of the faith. The sexual abuse unleashed by Hamas terrorists against innocent Israeli women is a further indication of the ideological mindset of Islamist radicals. For example, ISIS raped and abused Yazidi women – the irony being that some of the Yazidi women given asylum in the West have seen their captors on the streets.

We now see protestors in Canada rallying in favour of a radical Islamist terror organizations with impunity, a weak judicial system where criminals roam the streets on bail days after committing a crime, an influx of mass immigration with a lack of integration, assimilation, and respect for Canadian values, and a hyper focus on identity politics across our political institutions. A worrying thought: All the ingredients that allowed the “grooming gangs” to operate in the UK are now present in Canada. Canada should learn from the UK’s experience before it is too late.

Raheel Raza is President of The Council for Muslims Against Antisemitism and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.