Imagine that a foreign-born billionaire buys Facebook, asks its engineers to boost his own posts, and then introduces a payment system that rewards users for pandering to his whims and prejudices.
Also imagine that the billionaire happens across a news report on the death toll in Iraq following the allied invasion back in 2003, and links that carnage to the intelligence failures that were used to justify the war. Bristling with righteous outrage, our fictional billionaire then suggests that the state and the media have covered up this whole incendiary topic.
This was how Elon Musk sounded to many Britons after he belatedly discovered the organized child-sexual-abuse networks known as “grooming gangs.” Here was a real scandal: Networks of adult men, primarily British citizens of Pakistani descent, had trafficked and raped young girls in towns across England, over many years, aided by failures of local governments and the police. But the scandal wasn’t new, nor had reporters ignored it en masse. “You don’t hate the legacy media enough,” Musk insisted at one point during his multiday spree of posts on X, his social-media platform. Never mind that a legacy media outlet—Rupert Murdoch’s London Times—first broke the story of the child-sex-abuse ring in Rotherham, 14 years ago.
Musk’s horrified reaction to the scandal, which appears to have been prompted by a viral post on New Year’s Eve, is entirely justified. However, it comes quite late, and demonstrates his usual self-centeredness: His thinking seems to be that if he didn’t hear about the scandal during the 2010s, then surely no one else did, either. His ownership of X, and his alliance with Donald Trump, gives him the power to force any issue he likes into the political conversation. Lately he has used that power to intervene in European politics, berating British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, boosting the German far-right Alternative für Deutschland, and attacking the European Union for its efforts to regulate his businesses. Starmer’s opponents on the right, including the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, have been quick to echo Musk’s interest in the grooming gangs—even though Badenoch’s party was in power as the story originally unfolded.
The Times reporting kicked off dozens of prosecutions, multiple public inquiries, and even a primetime British Broadcasting Corporation drama. The story was well known enough that one of the police whistleblowers appeared on a celebrity reality-television show in 2018. The news even reached America: In 2014, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed that “what happened in Rotherham was rooted both in left-wing multiculturalism and in much more old-fashioned prejudices about race and sex and class.” The ethnicity of the perpetrators mattered, he argued, but so did the status of the victims—working-class girls whom the police saw as “‘tarts’ who deserved roughly what they got.”
Musk’s newfound revulsion at the details of the abuse is entirely justified—read the sentencing reports if you have the stomach for it. “Girls were raped callously, viciously, and violently,” the judge told nine men convicted of grooming offenses in the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale in 2012, adding, “Some of you acted as you did to satiate your lust, some to make money out of them. All of you treated them as though they were worthless and beyond all respect.”
The sexual abuse of children occurs in all human societies, but the forms it takes are culturally dependent. Like school shootings in the United States, grooming gangs are a particular type of crime that emerged from the laws and social conditions of a specific time and place. The gangs are not representative of the whole picture of what researchers call “group-based child sexual exploitation”—a phenomenon that in Britain appears to be dominated by men who are white, as you would expect from the makeup of the population. (England and Wales are more than 80 percent white, census data show; “Asian ethnic groups” are about 9 percent of the population.) Most grooming-gang defendants in the cases that have attracted media attention, however, were men of Pakistani descent. Many were connected to the nighttime economy, such as by running minicab firms and delivering takeout. They primarily targeted vulnerable girls—runaways or those who lived in foster homes. We know all this because of extensive reporting, testimony by victims and whistleblowers, and the bravery of politicians such as Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion, two Labour Party members of Parliament who were shunned by their own side for speaking out.
It is entirely reasonable to ask why they were shunned. In the 2000s and early 2010s, the racial dynamics of the grooming gangs made English towns extremely reluctant to face what was happening. Local South Asian communities were afraid to report the perpetrators in their midst. Police did not record complaints or investigate the issue actively; by some accounts, race riots in Oldham in 2001 made police emphasize “community cohesion” over what should have been their primary concern—dismantling organized-rape gangs regardless of the demographics of the perpetrators. White members of municipal councils fell into a pattern of assuming that problems among British Pakistanis were best left to their fellow councilors from that community. “Rotherham isn’t a very PC place, I think that is why the council overcompensated too much,” one local officer told an investigator in 2015. “It doesn’t want to be accused of being racist.”
Living through this story, experiencing the slow accretion of details and convictions and inquiries in real time, clearly felt very different from learning about it all at once. One of the main complaints to have surfaced since Musk reheated this story is that much of the original coverage was piecemeal and overly restrained: Had gangs of white men been trafficking immigrant women, it might have prompted a reckoning comparable to America’s protests over the 2020 murder of George Floyd. What qualifies as a “reckoning” is arguable—but I agree that the left would have raised hell about such a story, as the right has done with this one.
In response, some commentators, on both the left and right, have called for a “national conversation” about the gangs. What that conversation would sound like, however, is the tricky part. Would it include calls for the mass deportation of migrants, as many on Europe’s emergent right want? Is the answer militant secularization of Britain? Or a renewed insistence that the United Kingdom is a Christian country? Should Britain enact a “Muslim ban” or reject asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries? When liberals are still queasy about engaging with this topic, it’s because they sense that these shadow arguments lie just out of sight.
Although Musk is powerful enough to draw new attention to the Rotherham scandal, polling suggests that most Britons see his interventions as opportunistic. The X owner has a deep animus toward Starmer, the Labour prime minister, whom Musk sees as an enemy of free speech in general and of his platform in particular. Many of Musk’s posts called for implausible scenarios such as the King dissolving Parliament or the country holding fresh elections, adding to the sense that Musk had not deeply researched the topic before picking up his phone to post.
Nonetheless, the Conservative opposition, led by Badenoch, pandered to him, demanding a fresh national inquiry to “join the dots.” That reverses the Tory position of a year ago—back when the party was in power and had the ability to commission whatever inquiries it deemed necessary. (In 2019, the future Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that investigating historic sex abuses was money “spaffed up a wall.”)
Badenoch’s decision to echo the Musk line also minimized the work that the Conservatives did do in government to tackle rape gangs. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak created a “grooming gangs task force” that has helped police make more than 550 arrests. The Tories also accepted that some sentences given to gang members had been too lenient, and proposed to create a new aggravating factor in sex offenses involving grooming. That will likely be included in the Crime and Policing Bill this spring, alongside a mandatory-reporting measure requiring social workers and others to notify police when they suspect children are being abused. Despite all that progress, Badenoch understands that calling for a new investigation is one of the few ways for an opposition leader to attract attention. Just as the activist left sometimes refuses to believe that civil-rights victories have been achieved—remaining instead in a state of politically lucrative perma-war—so the right will not claim victory in having already forced Britain to take these gangs seriously. Conservatives want the fight, not the win.
Intriguingly, Britain’s other right-wing party, Reform, has been less harmoniously in tune with Musk in the past couple of weeks than the Tories have. Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, has joined Badenoch in calling for a new nationwide inquiry into the gangs. But he has refused to fulfill a peculiar demand from Musk: to normalize the pseudonymous agitator Tommy Robinson, whom the far right credits for making the grooming scandal public. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is not a folk hero. A founder of the xenophobic English Defence League, he risked collapsing one of the grooming trials by filming the defendants outside it. He is also a convicted mortgage fraudster and is currently in jail for contempt of court in a different case.
Robinson badly needs mainstream support to shake off his thuggish reputation, and Musk has taken up his cause. “Free Tommy Robinson!” Musk declared on X. He also faulted Farage—who has sought to keep racist “bad apples” out of Reform—for distancing himself from Robinson. Farage “doesn’t have what it takes,” Musk complained. Once again, the billionaire seemed out of touch with the British political scene: Farage, a key champion of Brexit, is the most successful leader that the British populist right has ever had. Reform won more than 4 million votes in last year’s election and looks set to make big gains in local contests in May.
To many Britons’ relief, Musk seems to be moving on to other subjects, including the California wildfires. His intervention has presented liberals with a difficult terrain to navigate. Yes, his interest was opportunistic. Yes, he spread conspiracy theories as well as the true scandalous details. But at least part of his instinctive reaction was correct: This was and is a scandal that shames Britain, as the Times asserted in 2012. It just isn’t a hidden one, thanks to the many victims and whistleblowers who have brought it into the open , beginning more than a decade ago. They deserve the tribute of having their bravery acknowledged.
The post What Elon Musk Missed About England’s Grooming Gangs appeared first on The Atlantic.
