This is an edited transcript of Anna Fisher’s talk at the ‘Grooming Gangs’: Where did the idea come from? webinar, held on Sunday 27 April 2025. The recording is available on YouTube.
Like most of you I am sure, I absolutely share the widespread horror at the treatment of the girls in the so-called grooming gangs scandals, but I’m also concerned at the narrow focus of much of the public debate.
Key questions
In this talk I’m going to address some key questions.
First: is the behaviour of the so-called grooming gangs completely alien, having been brought to the UK by immigrants from Pakistan? Or was the sexual use and abuse of working-class women and girls already deeply entrenched in British culture?
Second: Was the fear of being accused of racism the main reason that the authorities turned a blind eye? Or was it a lot more complicated, given that the authorities have been turning a blind eye to similar behaviour by white men for centuries?
I am hoping that this talk will throw some light on these questions.
Historical background
Before we go any further, we need to understand some of the history. Many of the communities of people of Pakistani descent in the North of England have their roots in the large wave of migration to the UK from Pakistan after the Second World War, peaking in the late 1960s. This was very shortly after Pakistan had emerged from centuries of British colonial rule.
They mostly came from rural areas of the Punjab and Azad Kashmir where they lived in tight-knit villages with an almost feudal economy and strict patriarchal social structures.
While women were at the bottom of the pile, they were surrounded by women of multiple generations, which provided solace and support, and sometimes a counterbalance to the collective power of the men.
The men responded to calls to help rebuild the British economy after the war and found work in textile mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire, engineering industries in the Midlands, and light industry further south. Typically, the men would come first and only send for their families once they were established, sometimes years later.
When their wives arrived, they typically lived in poor accommodation in run-down areas. Unlike their husbands who learned English at work, the women couldn’t speak English and as they mostly stayed at home, had little opportunity to learn it and they often became very isolated. This was in painful contrast to their lives back home where they lived in multigenerational extended families, contributed to work on the family farms, and often had freedom to move around their villages where everyone was kin.[1]
One of the impacts of all of this would have been to strengthen the men’s position relative to the women in these communities.
Meanwhile the social changes of the swinging sixties were forging ahead in Britain with women adopting skinny tops, miniskirts and hotpants – and racism was rampant. All of which would tend to make these migrant communities, who valued female modesty, turn inwards.
The police widely tolerated prostitution in the rundown areas where these families typically lived and along with racism, sexism prevailed. The Yorkshire police spent the entire 1970s failing to catch the prolific serial murderer of women, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, mainly because they failed to listen to all the women who had near misses with him and gave accurate descriptions that the police then ignored.
Sian is going to talk later, about how as a teenager in the 1980s, she was pimped by a local white drug dealer in a Midlands community. From when she was 13 until when she left school at 16, more than 5,000 mostly white British men raped her and paid her pimp for the privilege.
What she experienced was utterly horrific – and it was not significantly different from what the girls exploited by the so-called “grooming gangs” also suffered.
She says that “everyone” knew what was going on, almost certainly including the local police, but no one tried to stop it or to help her. Colloquially, she was the “slapper” who deserved everything that came to her.
What happened to her was, and still is, British culture. A culture where often everyone knows that women and girls are being exploited in prostitution but no one does anything to change it. In the 60s and 70s it was considered a bit of a joke, the subject of saucy seaside post cards and of pantomime innuendo. Now that the ‘sex work is real work’ ideology has taken over, it’s no longer a joke; it’s now considered a serious job. But either way, the women and girls who are its casualties are on their own. According to popular culture, they only have themselves to blame and they should have chosen a different kind of job.
Given all this, why should we be surprised that Pakistani men would also frequent prostitution – given its official tolerance and the patriarchal attitudes in their own culture? And later, as deindustrialisation accelerated from the 1980s onwards, and many of the men lost regular livelihoods, why would we be surprised that they turned to pimping girls and young women, and handing them round to rape like trophies, when this is what they saw white British men doing with pretty much impunity? Particularly given the context of Western-made porn eroticising and normalising this behaviour and this meshed so well with the low status of women in their own culture.
There will always be people who push at boundaries, to see how far they can go. That is why we have a criminal code. To make it clear that some behaviour is beyond the pale and you go there at the risk of sanctions that can be severe.
That’s the theory anyway. The trouble is when the law is not enforced, it doesn’t work like that.
The British state has long allowed the brutal sexual exploitation of mostly working-class girls and women to thrive and legislation against the perpetrators to go largely unenforced.
So, surely the British state has the biggest culpability here?
Because this did happen in full view of the state. The Pakistani gangs, but also the entire burgeoning sexual exploitation industry, and the vicious exploitation of Sian’s prostitution in the 1980s and of so many other women and girls.
‘Multiculturalism’ and ‘multi-agency’ projects
In the 1980s, to all of this – was added ‘multiculturalism’. On the surface, it sounds like an excellent thing – don’t we all want tolerance, mutual respect, and the valuing of all our unique cultures? Except that’s not how the policy works in practice.
Rahila Gupta of Southall Black Sisters explains it like this:
“At its worst [multiculturalism] challenges neither the structural basis of racism nor inequality. […] It relies on self-appointed community leaders who have no interest in social justice or women’s equality.
Through the politics of ‘multiculturalism’ the state more or less enters into an informal contract with the more powerful leaders in the minority community. In practice community leaders maintain power over family, [and the] cultural and religious affairs of the community, with the effect of concealing power relations between men and women and legitimising women’s subordination […].”[2]
Now consider how this was grafted onto a police culture that already considered male violence against women and girls to be not ‘real police work’ and possibly something that the women and girls intrinsically deserve, and that dealt with challenges and wrongdoing by closing ranks and turning a blind eye.
The ‘community leaders’ in these communities were invariably male religious leaders.
Along with ‘multiculturalism’ came ‘multi-agency’ projects, which would give centrality to the ‘community leaders’ while excluding more radical voices. The end result was often the ever further marginalisation of women and the complete overlooking of their needs, while the ‘community leaders’ would become part of the local hierarchies, tipping the balance of power ever further towards the men in these migrant communities.
So once the sexual exploitation of girls by men in these Pakistani communities started to become obvious, the reaction would have been similar to what would likely have happened if it came to light that the sons of powerful white men in the police or local Rotary club were running a prostitution ring.
Or indeed if it were a powerful white man, like Cyril Smith, who was the MP for Rochdale for 20 years (1972 – 1992) and who received a knighthood, even though he abused large numbers of children over decades. Needless to say, he was never held to account.
No one would want to upset the chief constable or the local imam they’d been sitting next to in multi-agency meetings for years and anyway it was just working-class girls “who only had themselves to blame”. So everyone would close ranks and not only ignore the problem but also do everything in their power to cover it up. Anyone who didn’t comply with this was obviously “too emotionally involved” and would be rigorously side-lined.
Once they’d done that, no matter what further evidence came to light, they’d have to continue the cover up because otherwise they’d expose their own complicity.
This is how hierarchal social organisations work.
In retrospect, years later, they might say that it was because they didn’t want to be accused of racism – but I believe that this is an oversimplification. To explain it as not wanting to be accused of racism sounds so much better than saying they were just a cowardly pawn who didn’t give a fig what men do to children. It also conveniently displaces the blame onto over-zealous anti-racism campaigners and ‘political correctness gone mad’.
‘No such thing as a child prostitute’
When the situation becomes too big to ignore, what usually happens is that one or two concessions are made which are presented as solutions, but that often bring about little improvement or might even make the situation worse.
One example of this was the removal of all references to child prostitution from the English criminal law in 2015 and its replacement with the term ‘child sexual exploitation’ (or CSE). This was in response to a campaign that used the tag line “no such thing as a child prostitute”. The idea was that if we changed the terminology, people would stop writing the girls off as prostitutes and would stop saying it was a lifestyle choice. But of course, changing attitudes and culture is much harder than changing terminology.
There have been many unintended consequences of this. It implies that adult prostitution is a “lifestyle choice” – which we vehemently dispute. It also obscures the fact that the perpetrators sold girls to other men to sexually use and abuse, for money, power, or status. In other words, the motivation was not just their own warped sexual gratification but also financial gain – the exact same motivation of pimps who exploit adult women’s prostitution.
Recognising this does not mean that we have to call the girls ‘prostitutes’ or to (incorrectly) suggest their involvement is a lifestyle choice. But not recognising the financial motivations of the perpetrators means that we are ignoring an important aspect of what is involved. The girls are not just sexually abused, they are also treated as commodities that can be bought and sold for another person’s benefit. This is human trafficking under international law (regardless whether they were transported from place to place).
Treating the exploitation of children’s prostitution as a fundamentally different phenomenon from adult prostitution means that no one needs to think how the two are connected. So instead of seeing a massive interconnected problem, linked by men’s demand to sexually use and abuse women and girls and the money that can be made from that, we get something like this.
Some small problems that are not connected in any way, and that don’t require challenging men’s demand.
This means that nothing fundamental has to change. The police can continue to “partner” with the big pimping websites and to not enforce the law on pimping and brothel keeping, the government can continue to include prostitution in GDP, and no one needs to think twice when the Government invests in Killing Kittens, a company that runs ‘sex parties’, or what are more accurately described as pop-up brothels. Yes. All these things are true and happening here in the UK. Right now.
Of course when paying for sex acts with an adult is considered acceptable, it is going to lower the inhibition to paying for sex acts with a 17-year-old or a 16-year-old – and what the hell, that 14-year-old is already well developed, so why not her too?
It also obscures what is happening in these so-called “grooming gangs”. It is no accident that in the Oxford case, which came to court before the legislation was changed, there was clear recognition that commercial gain was a key motivation. This was recognised by the judge in his sentencing remarks and was picked up at the time by the press, which reported that one girl was sold for £600 an hour.
Since the terminology in the legislation was changed to CSE, there has been much less acknowledgement, if any, of this aspect of these cases. Even the otherwise excellent Telford inquiry seemed devoid of awareness of the connections between adult and child prostitution and men’s demand for both.
It is as if the change in terminology has made many people feel that it is somehow improper to acknowledge the reality of the exploitation of children’s prostitution and its connections with adult prostitution. Sadly it seems that there is no equivalent inhibition in blaming the girls.
Age of consent
Another little-known aspect of the current epidemic of sexual abuse of children in the UK is our age of consent laws. Most people assume that the age of consent is 16 and any sexual activity with a child younger than that automatically counts as statutory rape or the equivalent for other child sexual offences. In fact in the UK this only applies if the child is 12 or younger. You heard that right. 12. Before most children reach puberty.
If the child is 13 or over, the defendant can claim that he thought she was 16 (18 in CSE offences) and it is up to the prosecution to prove that this is not true. This is a get out of jail free card for men allowing them to say “I thought she was 16, your honour. Honest.” It is often simply impossible to prove that wasn’t the case.
In addition, the CPS guidance on consent includes a long section on consent in CSE cases, even though consent is not relevant to the law on CSE.
This complicates the prosecution of child sexual offences and is likely one reason that successful prosecutions make up such a tiny proportion of the reported cases.
It is beyond time that the law was changed to move the burden of proof in all child sexual offences from the prosecution to the defendant – or even better to make them strict liability offences.
Modern Slavery Act
Another issue is that the Modern Slavery Act 2015, the human trafficking legislation in England and Wales, does not conform to binding obligations under international law, particularly as it relates to sex trafficking, which disproportionately affects women and girls.
More or less all of the girls exploited in the “grooming gangs” scandals meet the international definition of sex trafficking victims, but not under the definition in the Modern Slavery Act.
This and policy based on similar rationale, means that latest figures show that in the UK approximately three times as many labour trafficking victims (who are mainly male) are recognised as sex trafficking victims, who are almost exclusively female. If you include criminal exploitation with the labour exploitation, the disparity is even more shocking as this slide shows. This is extremely unlikely to represent the real facts. Instead it shows that the British authorities are simply not recognising the huge rates of sex trafficking right under their noses.
This is skewing the European and even the global statistics so that it seems that labour trafficking is a bigger problem than sex trafficking.
It is extremely unlikely that there’s 3 or 4 times more labour trafficking in the UK than sex trafficking because sex trafficking is obscenely profitable and comes with very little risk. Recent research found pimps and traffickers in the UK can gain £20,000 per month per woman or girl – meaning it is many times more profitable than any other form of human trafficking.
So is this behaviour totally alien to the UK?
So to go back to my original questions – Is the behaviour of the so-called Pakistani grooming gangs totally alien to the UK? I hope the answer is clear – that no, it’s not totally alien. The exploitation of the prostitution of working-class girls and young women is deeply rooted in the culture of this country. And it is growing, thanks in large part to OnlyFans, which is a British company.
It may be true that because of the unique nature of some of the Pakistani heritage communities, that men from these communities involved in the grooming gangs operate differently than for example the white men who also sexually abuse women and girls and ruthlessly exploit their prostitution. White men tend to operate in looser networks – whereas the men from these very tight-knit Pakistani communities tend to operate more clannishly. But frankly, I am not convinced that that makes a huge difference to the terrifying reality for the girls involved.
I have found it disturbing to see the rage directed at the Pakistani gangs by people who don’t seem bothered by similar behaviour by white men or the whole sexual exploitation industry.
We have to ask whether it has become a legitimate way for white women to rage against men while giving a free pass to the white men in their own families – sons, husbands, fathers, brothers and male lovers – some of whom at least are almost certainly heavy porn users and statistically likely to be sex buyers inflicting similar abuse and torture on women and girls?
Then there are those, like Charlie Peters and Adam Wren, who are exposing the horrors of these scandals. While many of them are doing excellent work, I worry about the laser focus on the Pakistani gangs and find the apparent inability to see the links with the mainstream sexual exploitation industry disturbing. How can we understand what is happening if we don’t join up the dots? How can we have a hope in hell of changing it, if we don’t see the bigger picture and how porn is driving the normalisation of this kind of behaviour?
On the surface, this does seem to me to be a form of racism – where it is acceptable to rage against Pakistani men but not white men.
White men like Leonid Radvinsky who is the owner of OnlyFans – which earned more than $6 Billion US Dollars revenue in 2023. A British company that in less than 10 years has succeeded in blurring the boundaries between pornography and mainstream culture in ways that earlier pornographers could only dream of – and that profits from and normalises the brutal sexual abuse of women and girls as a business model. A man who pays himself more than one million pounds a day.
Why are we not raging at him and the other white men in the neoliberal elite who are scooping up ever more wealth from the suffering of women and children.
Was racism the main reason the authorities turned a blind eye?
As to the other question we started with, was the fear of being accused of racism the main reason the authorities turned a blind eye to the grooming gangs? In my view, I think we’ve seen that it was indeed way more complicated. The key was not wanting to upset powerful men. In other words it is more of the same old, same old, patriarchy – the worship of power, the worship of those with power, the worship of the male, and the granting to all men, the right to sexually use and abuse women and girls of lower social classes.
There are many other examples of how the practice of ‘multiculturalism’ and consequent pandering to self-appointed male leaders have been discriminatory against women. For example, a law was introduced in 2002 giving courts the power to refuse to grant a divorce if a religious marriage has not already been dissolved. This has been a disaster for women in Muslim and orthodox Jewish communities, where only men have the power to grant religious divorces. And this is sanctioned by the British state.
Another example is that during the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement negotiations, the British Government succumbed to demands from male leaders of both Catholic and Protestant communities to not extend the Abortion Act 1967 to Northern Ireland as a condition of continuing the negotiations.[3] In this way, the British Government violated its obligations to the women of Northern Ireland at the behest of male political leaders on both sides.
I want to make it clear that this critique of multiculturalism is not in any way a criticism of racial tolerance and respect for cultural diversity. What I am critiquing is the way it was implemented by the authorities and the power it gave to unrepresentative patriarchal leaders. Rahila Gupta explained that “the problem lies not merely with the multicultural approach but with the way in which the notion of ‘community’ is constructed”.
The authorities would seek leaders who looked as much like themselves as possible. As the authorities in the 80s and 90s were (and mostly still are) operating under the values of a patriarchal hierarchical culture, they’d gravitate to leaders who also reflected these values and ignore, for example, bolshie women. It seems to me that this then became the modus operandi. I am sure you can think of other examples.
But a particularly relevant one is how most authorities only listen to lobbyists for the expansion and normalisation of the sexual exploitation industry and not to those who see it as violence against and women and girls. In Leeds, this led to the introduction of the decriminalised Holbeck street prostitution scheme and this is why the authorities persisted with it for years, even after Daria Pionko was brutally murdered by a punter there, and it was clear that the huge numbers of male kerb crawlers were terrorising women and children in the local community. It was not uncommon for male sex buyers to attempt to pick up school girls in uniform on their way to and from school. And yet the authorities persisted with this for years insisting against all the evidence that it was safer for the women.
So, while we may think that we live in a modern democracy in which women have equal rights as men, the reality is actually far removed from this. Our modern legislation has been grafted onto an establishment and systems that evolved over centuries before women even got the vote. This is demonstrated in our age of consent laws that date back to the 1880s and the patriarchal nature and values of most of our public institutions, including the police and local councils.
Added to which we’ve had decades of lobbying by well-funded pressure groups for the normalisation of prostitution and the expansion of the sex industry. This slide shows the logos of just some of them. We understand that it was their lobbying that resulted in our shockingly sexist Modern Slavery Act 2015 and that led in 2019 to Boris Johnson shelving the excellent age verification legislation that had already been passed by parliament and replacing it with the much less rigorous Online Safety Act, which six years later has still not been fully implemented.
Conclusion
I do not believe that the “grooming gangs” scandals can be fully understood without understanding the limitations in the law and the dynamics that I have touched on.
While the culture in the police and local authorities and other powerful institutions remain dominated by rigid hierarchies that value loyalty to the hierarchy, to those at the top, and to men’s sex right above all else, I fear we are likely to see many more such scandals unfold.
We need to change this. We need to change the narrative and the culture. We need to end men’s impunity to rape and torture women and children. We need to say NO to men’s impunity. We need to say NO to men buying sex acts under any circumstances, whether that’s online on OnlyFans and the webcamming rooms or in ‘real life’. That’s what the Nordic Model is about – it’s about making men understand that they cannot continue in the same way. Men are not babies and they need to begin to act like adults just as women are always required to do.
We must resist.
But please don’t despair. As Alice Walker so perceptively says, “Resistance is the secret of joy.”
[1] Wilson, A. Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain.
[2] Gupta, R. (2003) From homebreakers to jailbreakers: Southall black sisters. London, NY: Zed Books.
[3] Rossiter, A. (2009) Ireland’s hidden diaspora: The ‘abortion trail’ and the making of a London-Irish underground, 1980-2000. London: Iasc Publishing.