Opinion | Elon Musk’s Dishonest Demagogy on Grooming Gangs

Over a decade ago, a horrific sex trafficking scandal rocked Britain. Starting in the late 1990s, thousands of mostly white girls in the postindustrial north of England, many from struggling families, were groomed by networks of mostly Pakistani men, who often professed to be their boyfriends before trapping them in a hell of repeated rape and prostitution. Several girls were murdered.

The mass abuse went on for years as those who tried to sound the alarm — including Sara Rowbotham, a health worker in the town of Rochdale; a Manchester detective constable, Maggie Oliver; and a member of Parliament from West Yorkshire, Ann Cryer — were largely ignored.

Some of the official indifference was of the kind often faced by victims of abuse; in a 2017 documentary, Cryer described police officers saying that it seemed that the girls, many of whom were 12 or 13, were consenting. But given the ethnicities of the perpetrators and the victims, the authorities were also terrified of inflaming racial tensions, leaving girls to be sacrificed to their own political cowardice.

The first journalist to expose the grooming gangs appears to be the feminist Julie Bindel, writing in The Times of London in 2007. A few years later, the investigative reporter Andrew Norfolk published an award-winning series about the scandal in the same paper. Since then, there have been several high-profile trials and scores of convictions, as well as official investigations at both the local and national level.

That doesn’t mean the problem is resolved; Alexis Jay, the academic who headed up a national inquiry into the abuse, has said that few of the recommendations in her comprehensive 2022 report have been carried out. But the crisis has been out in the open for some time, even if Elon Musk only recently decided to make it a cause célèbre.

If you’ve been on X in recent days, you might have the impression that there has been some major new development in this awful story. Musk, the platform’s owner, has been posting about it incessantly, smearing Jess Phillips, the Labour minister overseeing issues of violence against women and girls, as a “rape genocide apologist” and calling for her imprisonment. He’s also called for the jailing of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and urged Britain’s king to dissolve Parliament and call new elections, something the monarch cannot do.