The Silence Surrounding Grooming Gangs
What strange times we live in. A politician placing his hand on a middle-class journalist's knee can dominate the news for weeks, while a gang of predatory men abducting and raping working-class girls gets a tiny write-up on page ten of your newspaper. This says something so disturbing to the victims in Rotherham and elsewhere: 'You don't matter. Preventing difficult discussion about cultural tensions in 21st-century Britain is far more important than your experiences of abuse.'
Even now,
discussion about Muslim grooming gangs is shushed. Anyone who raises it will be
branded an Islamophobe, a racist and maybe even a fascist. Look what happened
to the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, when she wrote about the
problem of largely Pakistani gangs abusing white girls. She was demonised by
Corbynistas. She was forced out of Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet. The message
was clear: talk about this issue and you will be punished.