Sex Grooming Gangs in UK: Society Protects Perpetrators, Not Victims – Author

UK Labour MP Sarah Champion has been given additional security after publicly condemning grooming gangs. According to reports, Champion received death threats after writing for The Sun last year. The lawmaker stated that the UK has a problem with Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.

Radio Sputnik discussed the issue of child sexual exploitation by South Asian men in the UK with Peter McLoughlin, author of the 2014 work Easy Meat, which delved into the issue of grooming gangs in forensic detail.

Sputnik: Ms. Champion, who addressed the issue of child sexual exploitation by men with an Asian background, has already been accused of hatred against minorities. What is your take on this? How grounded are such allegations?

Peter McLoughlin: The real hatred is coming from the men who perpetrate these crimes and the establishments have been complicit in the cover-up of the incredibly abusive efforts of these men to subdue these girls. They’ve been complicit in this cover-up for 40 years or more.

Sputnik: Tell us more about these grooming gangs. How do they operate and what should the parents do to protect their children?

Peter McLoughlin: The way that these gangs operate is that they use a relatively youthful young man to approach the girls. He’ll be attractive and he will woo some schoolgirl to pretend that he’s her boyfriend. And then once she’s in his clutches, he will pass her along to the other members of the gang, telling her things like it’s in his culture for him to share his girlfriend with his cousins and brothers. And before long this girl is addicted to drugs or alcohol and she’s being taken around the country and prostituted to much older men.

READ MORE: UK Police Increase Security for MP Who Spoke Out About Pakistani Grooming Gangs

Sputnik: To what extent is the racial background a factor when it comes to the issue of child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom?

Peter McLoughlin: There’s a complexity to this, which is that the victims of these crimes are overwhelmingly non-Muslims and the perpetrators are overwhelmingly Muslims. So it’s not really a question of race as such, but ethnicity. And the ethnic identity of these Muslim men encourages them to prey on non-Muslim girls. And the society we live in is one that would offer protection to the men and not to the victims.

Sputnik: Home Secretary Sajid Javid has ordered that research should be carried out into the characteristics of child sexual abuse gangs. What do you expect from the research and do you think it will help to tackle the problem?

Peter McLoughlin: I suspect that this is another active dissimulation. When my book came out in 2014 I was the first person to be calling for a national inquiry into this. The national inquiry has now been under way for four years and it has achieved virtually nothing. It’s not expected to even reach its conclusion for another six years. This problem has run so deep that every agency is complicit, the charities are complicit. All the evidence for this is documented in my book, which is why it was described as forensic, because I decided that this evidence needs to be accumulated and organized such that any future inquiry could not hide the existing evidence.

Sputnik: What could be proposed to tackle this issue?

Peter McLoughlin: There was an attempt to tackle it in 2007 by the crime agency who should have had responsibility for it, the serious organized crime agency. One branch of the organization produced a video to show in schools which was to teach the girls how the gangs worked. There was no other possible solution on the horizon – the state prosecutor wouldn’t prosecute, the courts wouldn’t convict, the social workers were ignoring it. The only thing that could be done was to cut off the supply by educating the victims. This film was ready by 2008; it was never shown in schools. It was distributed to schools but never shown. And the national inquiry that is underway at the moment should be looking into who stopped this video from being shown to the victims in order to educate them so that they could protect themselves from these gangs since no one else was going to offer them protection.

READ MORE: 'Tragic Scale' of Modern Slavery in Britain Revealed in 'Landmark' Report 

Sputnik: Why hasn’t this phenomenon been eradicated?

Peter McLoughlin: The earliest evidence I found so far is from 1975, the first core case. But up until around 2010-2011 it was being dismissed as a racist myth that these gangs existed. This was the CBM Muslim organization, the Muslim Council of Britain, which purported to represent 500 other Muslim organizations. So this organization along with the so-called anti-fascists were working along with police to ensure that anyone who would draw attention to these crimes would be demonized and cast as a racist and therefore not taken as being credible.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.