By Michelle Goldberg
More than ten years ago, a devastating sex trafficking scandal shook the foundations of Britain. Beginning in the late 1990s, numerous predominantly white girls from struggling backgrounds in the postindustrial north of England were preyed upon by networks of mostly Pakistani men, who frequently posed as their boyfriends before ensnaring them in a nightmare of repeated rape and prostitution. Several victims lost their lives.
The widespread abuse persisted for years as those who attempted to raise the alarm — including health worker Sara Rowbotham from Rochdale; Manchester detective constable Maggie Oliver; and West Yorkshire MP Ann Cryer — faced significant disregard.
This official apathy resembled what many abuse victims encounter; in a 2017 documentary, Cryer recounted police officers suggesting that it appeared the girls, some as young as 12 or 13, were consenting. However, due to the ethnic backgrounds of both the offenders and the victims, authorities were also deeply concerned about exacerbating racial tensions, effectively sacrificing the girls to their own political timidity.
The first journalist to reveal the existence of grooming gangs was likely feminist Julie Bindel, who wrote about it for The Times of London in 2007. A few years later, investigative journalist Andrew Norfolk released an award-winning exposé regarding the scandal in the same publication. Since then, there have been several prominent trials and numerous convictions, alongside official inquiries at local and national levels.
Nonetheless, this issue remains unresolved; Alexis Jay, the academic leading a national inquiry into the abuse, has stated that few of the proposals in her extensive 2022 report have been implemented. The crisis has been publicly acknowledged for some time, despite Elon Musk only recently choosing to elevate it as a significant matter.
If you’ve been active on the social media platform X lately, you might have the impression that there has been a significant new development regarding this tragic situation. Musk, the platform’s owner, has been incessantly tweeting about it, labeling Jess Phillips, the Labour minister responsible for issues concerning violence against women and girls, as a “rape genocide apologist” and calling for her incarceration. He has also demanded the imprisonment of Prime Minister Keir Starmer and urged Britain’s monarch to dissolve Parliament and initiate new elections, something the king is not empowered to do.
As the wealthiest individual in the world and a quasi-official member of Donald Trump’s inner circle, Musk wields immense influence, and his supporters in both the U.S. and the U.K. have rallied to the cause. Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, is calling for a new national inquiry, which her party could have easily pursued while in power until last year. Starmer was compelled to respond to Musk’s allegations on Monday.
Starmer’s involvement in this issue is far from disgraceful. As reported by The Financial Times, it was Starmer “who initiated the prosecutions of the Rochdale grooming gang” during his last year in the prosecution office, “shortly after the scandal in the Greater Manchester town became public.” Additionally, The Financial Times noted that his office revamped the way it “handles investigations of sexual abuse to ensure that more offenders are brought to justice,” facilitating the revisiting of old cases.
However, this doesn’t imply that Starmer’s record was flawless. In 2009, prosecutors from his office abandoned a case against a group of abusers in Rochdale despite existing DNA evidence, asserting that the victim would not be perceived as credible. Yet two years later, with Starmer’s backing, a new chief prosecutor for the North West England region, Nazir Afzal, reopened the case, leading to the convictions of nine men. As Afzal stated in 2022, “Keir was fully supportive of the decision to publicly acknowledge that we had erred previously.” You would not gather from Musk’s attacks that Starmer owned up to his missteps and took action to rectify them.
Meanwhile, it is notable that Musk has been ardently supporting an individual who jeopardized convictions in another trafficking case handled by Afzal. In 2018, far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson breached restrictions imposed by a judge during the trials of a grooming gang from Huddersfield by confronting some of the defendants live on Facebook. One of the jurors later referenced Robinson during deliberations, almost derailing the case. According to Afzal, “we had to fight to convince the court that the trial should proceed. Those criminals nearly escaped justice, and the victims nearly received no recompense.”
Robinson is currently incarcerated for contempt of court related to an unrelated defamation case, and Musk has continuously called for his release. When Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, attempted to dissociate himself from the abrasive Robinson, Musk called for Farage’s ousting. By positioning himself as the most dominant provocateur on Earth, Musk fails to offer any protection for women or girls. Instead, he appears to be demonstrating that the world is merely his plaything.
As I draft this, his pinned post on X features a quiz pondering whether “America should liberate the citizens of Britain from their tyrannical government.” (“Yes” currently leads the poll.) Like much of what he expresses, it represents a foolish but threatening jest. How unfortunate that the world must take him seriously.
