“What is the biggest story in the country right now not being covered?” I asked an acquaintance and former documentary producer over coffee just before Christmas. “Grooming gangs”, he replied without hesitation. The answer surprised me. The previous year he and the journalist Charlie Peters had already made a one-hour documentary with GB News on what is probably the biggest mass crime in modern British history, and one which through the attention of Elon Musk the entire world is now talking about.
Britain’s Shame told the story of how tens of thousands of girls, some as young as 11, had been systemically raped, tortured and even murdered by organized gangs of largely British-Pakistani men across across three decades. Abuse had been ignored by police and social workers, covered up by councils and in some instances even actively facilitated. From the time the story was first raised in 2003, it took nearly a decade of reporting, largely by the Times journalist Andrew Norfolk, before his famous 2011 “Revealed: conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs” front page brought the scandal mainstream.
Arrests were made and there were several widely publicized trials. There were inquiries and documentaries, a television drama, and even a book by Roger Scruton. Then once again the story quietly retreated to where it had come from: the terraced rows, care homes, and late night taxis of the largely forgotten towns and cities in post-industrial Britain where no one wanted to ever think about it again.
But the story never went away. The 2023 GB News documentary tried to thrust it back into the public eye. Academics and journalists had sanitized, or even outright refused to acknowledge the racial dynamic to the crime: crucial to understanding not just prevalence of the crime within a particular community, but the degrading, and indeed targeted, racist violence white girls were subjected to.
Academics and journalists had sanitized, or even outright refused to acknowledge the racial dynamic to the crime: crucial to understanding not just prevalence of the crime within a particular community, but the degrading, and indeed targeted, racist violence white girls were subjected to.
The complicity of the authorities had gone unpunished while the scale and extent of the abuse in up to fifty towns and cities was overlooked. Above all, there was compelling evidence the abuse was still happening.
Neither the state, nor the public, had ever really reckoned with the true nature of the crimes, largely out of a fear of transgressing two dominant edicts: that one is not to be seen as racist, and that one is to keep the peace within Britain’s multicultural settlement.
I remember the 2023 documentary provoked disquiet, largely because of the involvement of GB News, Britain’s upstart broadcaster that is associated with the freewheeling populist right. Friends privately disclosed they thought there were “dubious motives” to a reawakening of the story. Following the documentary in 2023, the government set up a taskforce to tackle this type of abuse. In the first year, 100 people were arrested for grooming and another 1,000 suspects were identified.
But despite this, and through no fault of its own, I don’t really think the documentary succeeded in widely overturning the initial discomfort in revisiting the story. When Charlie Peters visited a sentencing in Sheffield for a notorious gang in Rotherham, involving one girl who had been raped over 150 times since the age of 13, he was still the only member of the press present. Had he not been there, once again these stories would have probably slipped away.
Neither the state nor the public had never really reckoned with the true nature of the crimes, largely out of fear of transgressing two dominant edicts: that one is not to be seen as racist, and that one is to keep the peace within Britain’s multicultural settlement.
These crimes have always belonged to an ideological and geographical hinterland completely alien to the country we like to pretend we live in. The bizarre events of last week that have seen the scandal brought to the attention of the world’s most influential man have seen not just a reappraisal of the scandal, but of the nature of 21st century Britain itself.
