Racialising abuse

There was a dead silence in Westminster Hall as right-wing politician Rupert Lowe read the deeply harrowing testimonies of survivors of ‘grooming gangs’ during a parliamentary debate on the issue. Later, the MP posted on X, “For those mainly Pakistani men who have inflicted the very worst pain imaginable on innocent British children, please know this. There will come a day when the power of the British state that concealed your atrocious crimes for so very long is turned against you. It will be swift. It will be brutal. It will be severe.”

Grooming gangs refer to groups involved in the sexual exploitation of children in the UK. The issue is extremely sensitive and divisive, with some high-profile cases revealing a disproportionate number of British men of Pakistani descent involved in this heinous crime. The recent debate was sparked by a large online petition demanding the mandatory collection and public release of data on offenders’ nationalities, ethnicities and religions, which had previously been considered confidential. The police are accused of an institutional cover-up and of reluctance to record and disclose this information, purportedly driven by concerns about political correctness and a fear of accusations of racism.

Sexual grooming of predominantly vulnerable white girls, mostly from deprived backgrounds, has been recorded since the 1990s but was not seriously addressed until the 2011 exposé by The Times, which highlighted the horrific scandal but framed it as a racial crime committed primarily by Asian/Pakistani men preying on white girls. Parts of the media and conservative politicians have since perpetuated a misleading, decontextualised and sensationalist framing; terms such as ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ and, more recently, ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ have been mainstreamed to refer to the perpetrators of child sexual exploitation (CSE). This has led to the collective indictment of migrants and of Muslim and British Pakistani communities in the public psyche.

Now, there is a growing consensus that offenders’ personal data should be made public to get to the bottom of the problem, which is believed to have taken a toll on the UK’s social cohesion. However, the critics of this approach argue that linking ethnicity to CSE amounts to racialisation of the crime and will demonise entire groups for the grotesque actions by a few. There is also a concern that the ethnicity of non-white offenders gets far more emphasised in media narratives than that of white individuals. For example, in reporting on the Epstein scandal, these aspects have received little attention.

Terms such as ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ have been mainstreamed.

Although offenders of Pakistani origin are overrepresented in some high-profile cases relative to their share of the UK population and those implicated have received hundreds of years of convictions in total, the issue is highly politicised. A recent government-commissioned review found that, due to a lack of reliable data, it is not yet possible to draw national-level conclusions about which ethnic group is most involved in this crime. Regardless, the discourse of ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ has been firmly established across the political spectrum.

It didn’t happen organically; ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ has been the central trope in the rhetoric of the UK’s most prominent anti-Islam agitator, Tommy Robinson. He has exploited the issue to radicalise white working-class communities largely distraught over economic concerns. Since Elon Musk took over X, he and several other anti-immigration influencers have weaponised the issue to demonise Muslims and immigrants, to discredit British institutions such as the police, left-leaning po-liticians and parties, as well as to attack multicultural policies in the UK that ensu­­re fair and equal treatment of all mi-nority groups. The Centre for the Study of Organised Hate reported that Elon Musk shared 51 posts on the subject in one year, generating 1.2 billion engagements.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called for a comprehensive national inquiry into ‘grooming gangs’. However, right-wing politicians are determined to keep the issue in the spotlight. Figures such as Rupert Lowe, founder of the far-right Restore Britain party, and Nigel Farage of Reform are competing to outdo each other on the immigration issue, often using ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ as a bogeyman.

The topic is likely to be a key issue in a future election debate, with far-right parties seeing a real chance of gaining power for the first time. Meanwhile, as political opinions shift further to the right, the Muslim community in Britain is feeling increasingly anxious and politically homeless and is recalibrating its options.

The writer is a former BBC journalist and a PhD candidate at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds.

Published in Dawn, June 16th, 2026

if you want to get more information about this news then click on below link

More Detail