The Purpose of the System
On Britain's grooming gangs and the famous maxim, "The purpose of a system is what it does"
I wrote this essay in January of 2024 for American Mind as a kind of primer on Britain’s grooming gangs for an American audience. My main purpose was to raise awareness of the scale of the problem, on the occasion of a fresh report into abuse in Rochdale. Now that the grooming gangs are back in the news, thanks to Rupert Lowe’s “public inquiry,” I thought it would be a good idea to reprint this essay, the contents of which I believe still stand today, two years later. If you enjoy my writing and want me to continue producing essays and all the content on this Substack, please consider upgrading your subscription to a paid one. You’ll get full access to the entire archive, including podcast episodes, a fitness programme, essays, nutritional advice and recipes, as well as all new paid content. Your generosity is greatly appreciated.
A decade after the Jay Report detailed the methodical sexual exploitation of white English teenage girls by Asian Muslim “grooming gangs” in Rotherham, England—and the explicit efforts of the police to suppress prosecution in order not to appear racist—a new report has just come out describing a nearly identical set of circumstances in Rochdale, outside Manchester.
Though it may sound outlandish, the report suggests that the British government allows white British children to be raped, on an industrial scale, by gangs of Asian Muslim men, and routinely attempts to silence the victims and avoid investigating the perpetrators. That’s what an objective description of the evidence tells us. Forget what you think you know about what the British government or any other government is supposed to do, and just look at the facts. Look at what happens.
In recent decades, thousands of overwhelmingly white British children have been groomed and sexually abused by Muslim men of Asian descent, while the authorities, including social services, the police, and the Crown Prosecution Service, have largely turned a blind eye to what was happening. There have been trials, police investigations, newspaper stories, opinion pieces, television documentaries, and parliamentary debates—but still the grooming and the rape continue. And still there are apologists who tell us that the problem doesn’t even exist at all, though their voices aren’t quite as loud as they were ten or 15 years ago.
The majority of people convicted of child sexual offenses in the U.K. may be white, as you’d expect in a nation that is still predominantly white. But the nature of their crimes is different: usually individual, very occasionally in small groups, but nothing like the systematic, racial- and religious-based phenomenon we’ve seen with Asian grooming gangs, which often organize themselves around taxi companies and takeaway restaurants.
A 2017 study by a think tank claimed that 84 percent of people convicted of gang-related child-grooming offenses in the U.K. since 2005 were Asian men. The number of convictions, 222 out of a total of 264, belies the tremendous scale upon which abuse has been taking place. It was suggested in Parliament that somewhere between 250,000 and a million children may have been abused by grooming gangs nationwide, on the basis of extrapolation from the number of cases in northern towns like Rochdale and Oldham. Even if this is a high estimate—demographics in the south of the country are quite different from the north—we’re still likely to be talking about many tens of thousands of children.
Around the turn of the millennium, it was an open secret that Asian grooming gangs were operating in many towns and cities across the north of England and the Midlands, but the matter received police attention only by chance. The first probe in the Greater Manchester area began in 2008 when a local teenager was arrested for vandalism at a curry house. In police custody, the young girl revealed that she was being abused and raped by a gang of local Asian men. Although she provided a detailed account of the abuse and evidence, including a pair of her own underwear that contained the DNA of one of her abusers, the investigation was dropped, inexplicably.
It was only two years later, after repeated complaints by a local youth project, that the charges were picked up again, culminating in Operation Span and the conviction of nine Asian men for child sexual offenses in 2012. At the same time as hailing the convictions as “a fantastic result for British justice,” Greater Manchester Police, under significant public pressure, launched an internal investigation into why the allegations had not been investigated properly when they were first made.
That report took nearly four years to be made public, in 2015. Greater Manchester Police admitted misconduct, and several officers were named, but not a single one was subject to disciplinary action. The report took so long to emerge because it had to be redrafted several times, for reasons unknown. It was also redacted to protect the identities of the victims.
Grooming gangs were back in the British news in 2017, with reports of a shocking rise in their numbers and activities in the Greater Manchester Region. The number of suspected paedophiles in the area had doubled in a period of three years, reports of grooming had quadruped, and it was taking up to five months for the police to investigate incidents of online child abuse, according to newspapers.
The Betrayed Girls, a BBC documentary on abuse in northern towns like Rochdale and Oldham, also aired that year. The documentary featured testimony from victims and individuals involved with the police and social services, and pointed to wide-ranging failures by the police and child-protective services to take accusations of grooming gangs seriously. In response to the documentary, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham commissioned a new investigation into Operation Span and Greater Manchester Police’s handling of grooming-gang cases going right back to the early 2000s.
The results of that investigation have finally been released, and they fully substantiate the litany of accusations put forward in The Betrayed Girls. Despite everything the British public has already heard about grooming gangs—including the hideous story of Charlene Downes, who may have been chopped up by her abusers and sold as kebab meat—the report still makes for shocking reading. Most shocking of all the betrayals on display is that of Victoria Agoglia, a 15-year-old girl who reported to the police that she was being abused under the influence of drugs and alcohol. As in so many other cases, the police failed to intervene, but this time the victim was murdered, injected with a lethal dose of heroin by one of her abusers. Scarcely less appalling is the case of Child 44, who had an aborted child taken from her by police without her consent, which was then lost in a freezer. Child 41’s reports of abuse were discarded because the police believed she was a “willing participant.” I could go on. A catalogue of horrors and gross dereliction of duty.
It’s now clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the institutional failures of the Greater Manchester Police and local authorities allowed the grooming gangs in Greater Manchester to continue operating and to grow, even after the conclusion of Operation Span and its “fantastic result for British justice.” By refusing to give credence to a multitude of plausible allegations, the investigation claims, as many as 96 known groomers were let off the hook and have probably continued to rape and abuse teenage white girls. I suspect the number is far, far greater than that.
Damning as the new report may be, it’s hard not to conclude that it’s also part of the problem. Instead of telling us conclusively why the abuse took place and why the authorities failed to take it seriously, the report simply obfuscates and evades. The racial and religious motivations that lie at the heart of this abysmal saga are only hinted at, if they’re even mentioned at all. The report itself is just another betrayal.
