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.