Rape gangs prey on young girls. That, roughly speaking, is the headline that should be shocking the whole of Europe, yet it remains so far under the radar that it barely makes the news. Some victims of the notorious British ‘rape gangs’, also known as grooming gangs, have finally been able to tell their stories in recent weeks. Independent MP Rupert Lowe had conducted an independent investigation that focused primarily on collecting individual testimonies from survivors.
Lowe raised around $600,000 through a crowdfunding campaign to support the effort. The attacks on Lowe even led to a parliamentary inquiry into whether the fundraising campaign had been conducted properly. Lowe described the complaint as a malicious attempt to stop the investigation and thus also the testimony of the girls and women.
Groups of migrants
The rape gangs mentioned were groups of predominantly Pakistani men who were active in the United Kingdom from the late 1980s to the mid-2010s. Their victims were mainly white British girls. The gangs specifically targeted, groomed and sexually abused the girls, even raping them.
An independent investigation, funded and commissioned by the government, was launched last year. Elon Musk had publicly pressured Prime Minister Keir Starmer on the X platform about this issue. Led by Louise Casey, who was appointed by the government to investigate the incidents, the Casey Report, named after her, concluded that men from South Asia were ‘clearly’ among the accused. The report specifically named Pakistanis, Iraqis, Kurds and Bangladeshis. Casey concluded that the government had avoided addressing the identity of the perpetrators for years.
Giving victims a voice and a face
The driving force behind this was probably the fear of appearing racist, fuelling tensions or causing problems with social cohesion. Critical race theory comes to mind. Officials avoided mentioning the origin of the perpetrators because they belonged to intersectionally discriminated groups anyway. At least Home Secretary Yvette Cooper had since apologised to the victims. After the report was published last summer, she told Parliament that there had been too much trust in flawed data, too much denial, too little justice, too much impunity for criminals and too many disappointed victims.
That is the background to Rupert Lowe's investigation, which has just taken place under the name ‘The Rape Gang Inquiry’. This inquiry, which was conducted outside the official state structures, was unable to summon witnesses, request documents or initiate criminal proceedings. The aim was to gather information and pass it on to the authorities in a targeted manner. Only then would it be available for official investigations. The main focus was on further exposing the institutional failures that had enabled the abuse and compiling material for a possible report. However, the most important concern was to provide a public forum for the survivors and to give the victims of abuse a human face for the British public.
The women's accounts are gruesomely vivid and deeply disturbing. Elon Musk wrote on X: ‘Worse than the worst nightmare I could imagine.’ Victims of sexual violence refer to themselves as ‘survivors’ for good reason. This term indicates that sexual violence is a devastating form of violence that makes life afterwards feel not simply like continuing to live, but like surviving. The title ‘the survivor’ is used here to express both compassion and respect for the victims.
Testimonies that are almost unbearable to read
The survivors' testimonies are difficult to read. But it is important to face the cruel truth that the authorities wanted to cover up. Survivor Fiona Goddard opened the investigation with her testimony. The young woman's statement was recorded in several parts and can be seen on social media, including on her own page on X. In it, she describes a Pakistani man who targeted her and other girls in an orphanage. She describes in detail how the grooming took place: "He picked us up several times a week and took us to a park. He bought us alcohol, cigarettes and food. He talked about our past and our lives before we came into care."
Today, as an adult, she realises that he was trying to figure out our vulnerabilities. It was as if he wanted to find out what we were missing so that he could give it to us, Godard describes the process. She then described the abuse. She recounts that gangs of Pakistani men celebrated an Islamic holiday by raping the white girls they had previously ensnared. Some of the victims were abused by more than 600 men. ‘Fiona's words are absolutely heartbreaking,’ Lowe writes in the post on X, which features the video of the testimony.
Humiliated and hurt
Sammy Woodhouse is a prominent survivor of the Rotherham grooming scandal, in which, according to the BBC, more than 1,400 girls were sexually abused between 1997 and 2013. She is the author of the memoir ‘Just a Child’ and was one of the main organisers of the investigation. She reports on further statements. Another survivor testified that she was trafficked as a child. Instead of being helped, however, she was criminalised and imprisoned. Later, the woman converted to Islam in order to survive. She was forced into several Muslim marriages, gave birth to several children and was eventually sold to Saudi Arabia. In a separate post, Woodhouse shared the testimony of another survivor who spoke about how she was abused and raped by Iraqi men.
The reports shake one's belief in any form of justice. Girls who physically resisted their rapists were beaten and threatened with death. Some were threatened with guns, others were doused with petrol, with the kidnappers threatening to burn them alive. Some were thrown out of moving vehicles. Families who reported the crimes were attacked with firebombs by the perpetrators. Those who continued to contact the authorities had their windows smashed and were threatened with arson.
‘They all had sex with me’
Rupert Lowe and Sammy Woodhouse are now publishing selected quotes from witness statements on black cards on X. Just one example: "When the restaurant closed, he took me to where the tables were stored and we had sex. Immediately afterwards, all the restaurant staff came into the room. [Members of the rape gang] held me down while they took turns having sex with me and laughing. Later, in the car, he insulted me, verbally abused me and blamed me for what he had forced me to do." There are countless cards with countless statements like this one.
The content is always the same: gangs of migrants humiliate, insult, rape and injure young women, subjecting them to violence on a scale that is unthinkable in a civilised world. They treat these young women worse than animals. And as if that weren't bad enough, a twisted ideology ensures that not only are the perpetrators not prosecuted, but the victims are repeatedly at the mercy of their attackers. A spiral of silence surrounding wokeness repeatedly delivers the women into the hands of their attackers.
Recognising these terrible crimes against young girls means naming the ethnic and religious backgrounds of the attackers – something the British authorities have shied away from for decades in order to avoid accusations of racism or Islamophobia. But naming the perpetrator profiles in the Islamic milieu of immigrants on the island would mean acknowledging that not all foreign cultures are automatically compatible with the fundamental norms of Western civilisation. Leftists around the world would fight with all means against the evidence of this realisation.
It's not over yet
In the meantime, large numbers of other women have come forward to The Rape Gang Inquiry. Women who want to tell their stories of rape and abuse so that this does not happen to others. Lowe and his colleagues want to continue so that the survivors can speak out. Rupert Lowe spoke out clearly at the end of the hearing. He said he could not find the words to describe the courage and bravery of the women who had come forward. He continued: "What they have been through is indescribable. It has been a life-changing experience for me. I never thought such evil was possible. Never. Not here in Britain. In our cities, in our communities. It is pure evil. These men are deeply depraved." If it were up to him, Lowe said, thousands of them would receive the death penalty. In addition, he drew another conclusion in view of the inaction and silence of numerous fellow politicians: on 13 February, he founded his own party, Restore Britain. The movement's central demand is the deportation of such perpetrator communities from England.