Inflammatory language around grooming gangs who abuse children in the UK could demonise entire communities and lead to atrocities against Muslims, similar to the New Zealand mosque massacre which killed over 50 people, UK health secretary Wes Streeting warned in an interview with The Guardian.
In 2011, media and police investigations revealed that girls had been abused and raped after being “groomed” by men who were of predominantly Asian background in several towns in northern England, including Rotherham and Huddersfield.
However, UK media have been accused of covering the issue in an inflammatory way, with excessive focus and fearmongering about the Muslim and Pakistani perpetrators of the criminals.
Researchers have pointed out that similar crimes by gangs of non-Asian and non-Muslim paedophiles do not receive the same amount of coverage in the media.
Streeting, who represents east London’s Ilford North constituency in the UK parliament told The Guardian, “there are people in my community who have either Pakistani heritage or look different, who are now more fearful today than they were before.”
The right-wing owner of the X social media platform, Elon Musk, has recently made hundreds of increasingly erratic posts about the grooming gangs issue, using it to attack UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and calling prominent Labour MP Jess Philips a “genocide rape apologist”.
In his interview with The Guardian, Streeting also accused opposition Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch of further inflaming the issue.
Badenoch has been accused of playing politics by recently calling for a national inquiry into grooming gangs, when no such inquiry was held in the 14 years when the Conservatives were in power.
“If Kemi Badenoch is in any doubt whatsoever about where irresponsible and coarse public discourse can lead on this issue, look on the other side of the world, in Christchurch, New Zealand, where someone walked into a mosque and killed innocent Muslims stone cold dead,” Streeting said.
Brenton Tarrant, the far-right extremist who carried out the 2019 massacre at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, had the words “For Rotherham” painted on one ammunition clip he used to kill Muslim worshippers.
Over 50 people were killed and 89 injured in New Zealand’s worst ever mass shooting.
In an apparent reaction to Musk’s intervention in the issue, Streeting said, “We’ve given way too much air time to one tech titan who lives in a different country, who, frankly, doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to what happens here in Britain.”
Streeting however, also called out the “sickening” crimes of sexual abuse gangs, suggesting that “political correctness” had resulted in the stifling of discussion around the issue, with thousands of children being let down as a result.
Statistics regarding grooming gangs however, are controversial. While UK media have reported that most of those convicted of taking part in grooming gangs in the north of England in the previous decade are of Pakistani origin, other research has found that on a UK-wide scale, most paedophiles who operate as part of organised gangs belong to the white British majority of the population.
