From "Grooming Gangs" to Epstein list
Elon Musk's tweets catapult mass rape into the spotlight and reignite an old debate.
British-Pakistani rape gangs have been wreaking havoc in Great Britain for decades. Politicians and authorities are said to have covered up their crimes against minors, partly for fear of being seen as racist.
“Grooming”: targeted contact between adults and minors for the purpose of sexual initiation. The adult attempts to gradually gain the trust of the victim in order to make them sexually submissive later on.
Background
Crimes committed by so-called grooming gangs have been documented in 50 municipalities in the United Kingdom, mainly in the north of England. Rotherham, for example, is located in the county of South Yorkshire. As of 2024, the town had 71,535 inhabitants. According to an investigation report from August 2014, around 1,400 girls, mainly from care homes and some as young as 11 years old, were repeatedly raped, beaten, drugged and forced into prostitution by grooming gangs in the town between 1997 and 2013. “Some were doused with gasoline and threatened to be set on fire. Others were forced at gunpoint to watch 'brutally violent rapes' - and then warned that they would be next if they told anyone.” The first indications of these crimes emerged in the early 1990s, when home managers investigated reports that children in their care were being picked up by cab drivers.
Fast forward: Three decades later, the number of underage victims of grooming gangs in the UK is estimated to be as high as 250,000 nationwide. At the very least, there are many thousands, probably tens of thousands. The number of unreported cases is assumed to be high. In 2018, Lord Malcolm Pearson of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) spoke in the House of Lords of “millions of rapes of white and Sikh girls by Muslim men, of whom only 222 have been convicted since 2005.”
In the vast majority of cases, there were never any police investigations or convictions, as parts of the political and judicial system are said to have covered up the monstrous crimes of the rape gangs so as not to be seen as racist. Many police officers, social workers and officials are also said not to have taken the victims seriously or even allowed themselves to be bribed by their tormentors. Sam Ashworth-Hayes from the British daily newspaper The Telegraph posts two hair-raising examples of police corruption on X. A 2003 police report from South Yorkshire describes how a 15-year-old girl was found guilty of prostitution in court by the same man the police had caught her having sex with.
The unscrupulous business with underage girls would probably have gone on for some more decades if the matter had not come to the attention of US billionaire Elon Musk. His provocative posts on his platform X set off a veritable avalanche that has the potential to sweep the Labor Party from its seats in government. After all, none other than the current Prime Minister Keir Starmer was the Crown Prosecutor between 2008 and 2013. His senior authority had to decide whether or not to open investigations into suspected perpetrators. Excerpt from a court file on X:
“it took them [Greater Manchester Police] 11 months to send a file on the case to the Crown Prosecution Service which decided in July 2009 that Girl A would not be a credible witness in court and did not, therefore, go ahead with a prosecution. The police decided not to contest the decision even though Ahmed had no explanation for how his DNA had been found on Girl A’s underwear.”
In 2020, when Keir Starmer was already Labour leader and Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons, social worker Jayne Senior, who had contact with victims of grooming gangs and meanwhile sat on Rotherham council for the Labour Party, wrote to Starmer. She had wanted to make the extent of the abuse public, she wrote to him. But instead of the support she had hoped for, she had experienced “repeated hostility from the Labour Party and Labour-controlled local authorities”. According to the British TV station GB News, Jayne Senior never received a reply from Starmer.
The current debate
The avalanche of revelations and accusations that is now rolling in took its course when Oldham council in Greater Manchester requested that the activities of the rape gangs in the area be delegated to central government or the House of Commons in London. There had already been a local report in Oldham in 2022, but it only covered the period from 2011 to 2014. And the problem still existed, so they wanted to take it to a higher level. However, the Secretary of State for the Safety of Women and Girls, Jess Phillips, rejected the application. According to GB News, she recommended that the council conduct another local investigation. Phillips' decision caused a storm of outrage and was also criticized by high-ranking Tories, although the previous Conservative government had rejected a similar request in 2022.
"For anyone doubting the severity and depravity of the mass gang rapes of little girls in Britain, go to the source material and read the court transcripts", Elon Musk writes on X in order to explain his interference. "I did":
“53) You, Mohammad Karrar, prepared her for gang anal rape by using a pump to expand her anal passage. You subjected her to a gang rape by five or six men. At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed into her mouth to keep her quiet.”
Elon Musk also shares the video documentary Silenced by right-wing activist Tommy Robinson on X, which has been banned by the UK courts. The amateur journalist is currently in prison for contempt of court. For the umpteenth time. In 2017, he had filmed four Muslim defendants at another rape trial at Canterbury Court. His prison sentence was suspended for 18 months at the time. A year later, while still on probation, according to media reports in Leeds, he again filmed and questioned defendants as they were about to enter the courthouse. British bestselling author Douglas Murray describes what happened next in an article: “The police turned up in a van and swiftly arrested Robinson for ‘breach of the peace.’ Within hours Robinson had been put before one Judge Geoffrey Marson, who in under five minutes tried, convicted, and sentenced Robinson to 13 months.” This was in 2018. And so now Robinson is serving 18 months, currently in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison. On X, he can be heard showing a group photo of high-ranking police officers having their picture taken with gang leaders and child traffickers.
“In two cases we read, fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to be arrested themselves when police were called to the scene.“
Court transcript
Other countries
The phenomenon of “grooming” is by no means limited to Great Britain. In 2013, German television's legendary detective “Schimanski” pursued a so-called lover boy all the way to Rotterdam, Netherlands, to free a girl from the clutches of her pimp. This guy had also emotionally “groomed” the minor and ultimately made her sexually submissive. Different terms, same procedure. In the Sunday evening TV crime series “Tatort” (Crime Scene), the culprit had the German first name Nils at the time, but nowadays the “lover boys” in the Netherlands are usually called Mohamed or Ahmed (to name the most common Arabic names) and are of Moroccan descent. This is how the Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who herself lived in the Netherlands for fourteen years, describes it in an interview with GB News. In her opinion, religious affiliation and the associated misogynistic socialization as well as the migration background of the perpetrators are at the heart of the problem.
Further in Germany, reported the daily newspaper WELT (World) in 2019: “The two main defendants with Turkish and German citizenship had developed a perfidious system to make the women emotionally dependent. (..) The male teenager of Macedonian origin served as a decoy and helper.” As early as 2017, Das Erste / ARD (First German Television), highlighted “Unscrupulous Lover Boys” in a themed evening: “One evening they go out for a fancy dinner, after which Hassan takes her to a child prostitution”. A TV documentary from 2020 mentions “criminal networks and clans” operating in the background, “which makes it dangerous for the victims.” In June 2024, the German government responded to a Minor Question from a member of parliament by stating that the number of migrants involved in gang rape had risen disproportionately to over fifty percent since Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the border in 2015. Most of the perpetrators are young Muslim men with or without a German passport.
Investigation and accountability
Many British media outlets euphemistically referred to the Pakistani rape networks as “Asian gangs of child seducers” in the name of political correctness. And to the perpetrators as “men from Asia”. In the 15th season of the British cult TV crime series “Silent Witness” in 2008, the team of forensic experts dealt very specifically with a grooming gang. However, as the plot came close to the real events in the town of Rochdale, where a trial against nine alleged gang members was taking place at the time, the BBC removed the episode “And then I found Love” from the program and repeated an older episode instead. According to the Daily Mail, BBC bosses felt it was “too sensitive” to air the episode as the trial was about to reach its verdict. The jury found the nine men, aged between 24 and 59, guilty of charges including rape, child trafficking and sexual exploitation.
The investigative GB News documentary Grooming Gangs: Britain's Shame from 2023 allows survivors, whistle blowers and activists to have their say and explores the extent to which the police and authorities have allowed a cover-up on this scale for so long. Is the whole thing possibly also a class issue, as most of the victims came from the working class? “The solution to ending this horrendous abuse has to come from the top,” says the former police officer Maggie Oliver. As she recounts in the documentary, she collected evidence after evidence, all of which was then classified as insufficient. After resigning from the force, she set up a foundation for survivors of sexual abuse.
Since Elon Musk's repeated calls for full disclosure, British politicians have been mainly concerned with damage limitation. “Some of the criticisms that Elon Musk has made I think are misjudged and certainly misinformed,” said Health Minister Wes Streeting. Other critics argue that Musk has raised the issue to target Starmer’s government and bolster the right-wing party Reform UK, known for its anti-immigrant stance. Still others argue that there is too little valid data collected on the ethnicity of the perpetrators. According to the BBC, police data from 2023 shows that 26 percent of group-based sexual abuse of children was committed within families and 17 percent by groups, including grooming gangs. Public outrage continues to boil over. On X, a British woman calls for King Charles to intervene. “We can't have Keir at the head of the country while he was at the head of the Crown Prosecution Service while all this was going on.” Elon Musk is now not only calling for the resignation of the government and new elections. but also for Keir Starmer to be prosecuted.
Starmer himself rejects the accusations against him and describes them as part of a disinformation campaign. The Labour Party has already blocked an initial inquiry into his conduct as head of the Crown Prosecution Service in the investigation into grooming gangs in the city of Oldham. Former Labour MP Simon Danczuk from Rochdale has revealed to GB News that senior Labour politicians pressured him not to draw attention to the rapists' ethnicity because it could hurt their electoral chances in the Muslim community. The UK's first Pakistani Muslim MP, former Labour MP Lord Nazir Ahmed of Rotherham, was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison in 2022 for abusing two children in the 1970s. A task force set up to address grooming gangs in April 2023 by then prime minister Rishi Sunak is said to have arrested over 550 suspects in its first year of operation. Current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is now calling for a nationwide inquiry.
A survivor who was abused by gang members for the first time at the age of 11 will finally see the start of the trial against one of her alleged rapists in February 2026. She will have waited almost 30 years for this moment.
Epilogue
On GB News, the medium that has been most persistent in its efforts to shed light on this issue, Neil Oliver raises some more profound questions: Why is this “child abuse on an industrial scale”, to which political leaders and institutions would at best have turned a blind eye for decades, suddenly coming to the table after all? And he gives himself an answer: “If we are invited to look at it all now and know it all now, then this is because the timing suits someone's agenda.” In his eyes, the truth isn’t acknowledged because acknowledging the truth is the right thing to do: “It’s been acknowledged now because to do so is politically expedient - now.” Why, the commentator goes on to ask, does a US billionaire care about the horror in the English countryside - while similar monstrosities have been bubbling to the surface in the US for years? Will the names of the celebrities, politicians, millionaires and billionaires on the client list of convicted child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein be dragged out into the open just as relentlessly?
The bottom line is that it is frighteningly simple, says the commentator. Which is why human trafficking competes with illegal arms and drug trade for the title of most profitable industry in organized crime. “You can sell a bag of drugs only once, but you can sell the same child twenty times a day.”
This text was first published in German on my website.