Why Rotherham happened

A story of catastrophic elite failure

An audio version of this essay – read by me – is available below the paywall. All essays are partially paywalled for the first 30 days after publication.

You all know what I mean by the word ‘Rotherham.’ In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard observes that there is no true synonym for ‘9/11’ – no one refers to the ‘World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks’ or the ‘Bin Laden attacks’, but just to the date itself, typically in its abbreviated form. Perhaps, he suggests, this is because the events of that day were so shocking, and so significant, that they must be described abstractly. We cannot find the right words.

There is no true synonym for ‘Rotherham’, either. ‘Child sexual exploitation (CSE)’ is the sterile term favoured by most institutions. ‘Child sexual abuse ring’ or ‘grooming gangs’ is more common in the media. None of these terms are satisfactory.

‘Grooming’ is a particularly ridiculous euphemism for what we mean when we use the word ‘Rotherham’ – that is, the rape and sexual torture of tens of thousands of underage girls in Britain, over a span of many decades, by Middle Eastern, East African, and South Asian Muslim men (predominantly Pakistani) who targeted these girls because they were white and non-Muslim. There is no disputing the fact that the motivation for these crimes was – and is – explicitly anti-white. Many of the perpetrators have said as much in both court testimony and police interviews.

And this didn’t just happen in Rotherham. The journalist Charlie Peters, an early MMM guest, has described this as the biggest race hate scandal in twenty-first century Britain, having identified at least fifty places in the UK in which these gangs have operated, and are continuing to operate. Notable among these is Oxford, a city in which predominantly Pakistani areas in the east abut predominately poor white areas at the very edge. Excerpts from the sentencing remarks relating to the 2013 conviction of members of an Oxford gang have re-emerged on Twitter this week, and have attracted the attention of a lot of people outside Britain, including Elon Musk, who were previously unaware of the grotesque nature of this sexual torture.

This has all been in the public domain for a long time. Julie Bindel first wrote about it in 2006. But outrage at the ‘Rotherham’ phenomenon has been very effectively suppressed by the government and much of the media, which means that most people – including most Britons – do not know the details.

For my sins, I do know the details. From 2016 to 2018, I worked for a charity in Oxford that supports victims of sexual violence. This was in the wake of Operation Bullfinch, the police investigation into a gang that had been operating in the city since at least 2004, which included the individuals whose depravities have recently been circulated on Twitter. A 2015 serious case review led to the creation of a specialist charity and police unit (the Kingfisher team). I didn’t work with so-called “CSE victims” directly, because that was not the role of our charity, but I did attend a lot of multi-agency meetings which were focused on “CSE.”

I never witnessed anyone failing to follow the procedures formally demanded of their role. What I did witness, however – many, many times – were charity workers and (to a lesser extent) social workers and police officers clamouring to insist that “the stereotypes” about CSE were not true. That is, that the victims were not always white girls, and that the perpetrators were not always Muslim men.

Which, technically, is true – in large part because the definition of CSE adopted by government agencies came to be so expansive that it included all sorts of sex crimes that had nothing to do with what ‘Rotherham’ represents. Teenage boys groomed into sending naked photos to adult men on the internet, for instance, was a kind of crime that I repeatedly saw categorised as CSE. “People of all genders sexually assault people of all genders” was a phrase one of my colleagues was fond of repeating. It was all obfuscation. They must have known that.

Because the specific kind of crime that ‘Rotherham’ represents is absolutely racialised, and it is not rare. Rotherham itself is a small town. By a conservative estimate, 1,400 girls were abused over a 15 year period, representing a very substantial minority of white girls living in Rotherham at the time, perhaps as high as 1 in 3. Meanwhile, 1 in 73 Pakistani men in Rotherham were prosecuted for their involvement in the abuse, with an unknown additional number evading detection. Almost everyone in Rotherham knows someone involved, either as victim or perpetrator. It should not surprise us that, during last Summer’s race riots, the town was the site of some of the most serious disorder.

But a post-industrial Northern town like Rotherham feels a very long way from Westminster. ‘Rotherham’ as a synecdoche doesn’t just represent the racially-motivated sexual torture of adolescent girls, it also represents catastrophic elite failure.

A failure, in the first instance, in permitting the culture clash that resulted in ‘Rotherham.’ Anyone with an ounce of sense should have realised that the post-sexual revolution culture of Britain and the very conservative sexual culture of a Muslim country like Pakistan would not mix happily. The men who participated in the rape gangs were clearly not good Muslims, not least because they drank alcohol. But they nevertheless conceived of themselves as ethnically and religiously distinct from the majority-white population, whose daughters were understood to be legitimate targets of sexual violence.

This, too, in the era when online porn became widely available, which surely contributed to the sense that white girls (“white slags” and “white whores”, as the perpetrators described them) were fair game. The predominance of white and East Asian women in online porn means that it effectively functions as racist propaganda, teaching men across the world – including those who have never actually met a white or East Asian person – that these women are as pornography represents them: desperate for pain and humiliation.

Men whose sexual tastes had been trained on this propaganda found themselves in the midst of a sexually liberated culture in which adolescent girls are not fiercely guarded by their male relatives, and most girls are not supervised when they go out, even at night. They targeted the girls whose supervision was most lax, particularly girls in foster care who could disappear for days on end without provoking much in the way of adult action. Very many teachers, carers, and NHS staff had a sense that something was going on, since they saw underage girls in the company of “older Asian boyfriends.” But this was typically written off as behaviour characteristic of the British underclass. They were just “white slags.”

The authorities did not want to know. Not only did these crimes go uninvestigated, victims and their families were frequently stonewalled or persecuted by the police. The father of one 15-year-old girl in Rotherham, whose attack had been so brutal she later needed surgery, was told by a police officer that the experience would “teach her a lesson.” Again and again, adults in positions of authority discovered what was going on, and yet decided that these underage girls were making their own decisions – that they were demonstrating agency – and so took no action. During this long period of failure, at least three victims were murdered: Laura Wilson (17), Lucy Lowe (16), and Charlene Downes (14). Iyad Albattikhi, the owner of a fast food shop in Blackpool who was tried for Downes’ murder, told one witness that her body had “gone into the kebabs."

It’s awful, I know. So awful that it’s tempting to dismiss it all as exaggeration, or even as a malicious invention by the far-Right. When former Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced the creation of a Grooming Gangs Taskforce in 2023, even so many decades after the problem first emerged, one Guardian writer accused her of inflaming “Islamophobic and xenophobic prejudice.” Dismissing all of this evidence as lies has been the preferred coping mechanism of the British elite – the people with no social connections to places like Rotherham, who are all eager to believe in the success of our multicultural project. The establishment did not want to know about ‘Rotherham’ – still does not want to know about ‘Rotherham’ – because it upsets that fantasy.

But this is hard history now, beyond dispute: police forces across the country prioritised the prevention of race riots over the prevention of the sexual torture of tens of thousands of children, and almost all of the media and political class turned a blind eye to it (with some important and admirable exceptions), precisely because the perpetrators were motivated by anti-white animus. That fact is so shocking, and so significant, that we cannot find the right words.