Tech mogul turned misinformation peddler Elon Musk tweeted that safeguarding minister Jess Phillips should be locked up after she rejected a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation.
It’s a bold claim from the right-hand man of an incoming president caught on tape proudly saying “grab ‘em by the p***y.” But Musk isn’t alone in this hypocritical outrage.
Following Musk’s tweet, we saw hollow finger-pointing play out as politicians and commentators expressed their disgust over the handling of the grooming gang scandal, all for their own agendas.
Last week, prime minister Keir Starmer hit back at Tories who claimed that child abuse was only now being spotlighted thanks to Musk’s tweet, arguing the previous government did ‘little to improve matters’ after the original inquiry in 2014.
To this, the Tories protested they would have introduced several of the recommendations from Professor Alexis Jay’s 2022 report, as Starmer intends to do now, as part of their Criminal Justice Bill. But at the end of the day they didn’t.
As it stands there is still no legal obligation to report suspicions of abuse. And now, the victims of the scandal are being lost among the noise. The conversation about the abhorrent abuse of young girls by grooming gangs has been hijacked and become nothing more than a way of scoring cheap political points.
For example, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, Robert Jenrick, weaponised the conversation of grooming gangs to fuel his points about migration.
“We need to end mass migration,” he wrote in The Telegraph. “Not all cultures are equal: importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here.”
Robert Jenrick used grooming gangs to make point on ‘alien cultures’ in an interview on Times Radio
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Image:
Jonathan Brady/PA Wire)
Using analysis from the Centre for Migration Control that suggests foreign nationals are more than three times as likely to be arrested for sexual offences compared to British citizens, Jenrick and his fellow commentators have blindly ignored the wider issue and reality of sexual abuse happening to women and girls all over the country, by men of all backgrounds.
As Prof Jay said herself, lack of data means “it’s impossible to know whether any particular ethnic group is over-represented as perpetrators.” This so-called anger has become no more than a means to win points with likes of the Musk-Trump-supporting ilk.
If these supposed defenders of women and children cared about abuse, they’d focus on the wider failures of the justice system, which has repeatedly let the victims down and allowed abuse to go unaddressed.
They should question why women are blamed for their own assaults and be angered that cases collapse due to insufficient evidence or systemic bias. After all, isn’t that what we would expect of the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice?
Shocking statistics estimate that 800,00 women are sexually assaulted each year. Five in six of those women who are raped don’t report it to the police, and only three in 100 rapes result in someone being charged – let alone convicted. And research into 2,275 young people aged 11-17 suggests around one in 20 children in the UK have been sexually abused.
Where are the solutions to help lower these statistics? Action needs to be taken and it need to be taken quick.
But more than anything, before politicians and commentators go pointing fingers, they should take a hard look around them. Have they actually really stopped to think about the perpetrators of all these crimes? And I mean all of them.
Have they ever taken a moment to think about the behaviours that perpetuate a culture of abuse? Have they called out their friends or family for cat-calling or touching a woman without consent?
Are they actively teaching the next generation of the dangers of people like Andrew Tate? Or have they stood by, bored of ‘woke’ women accusing people like Gregg Wallace of inappropriate behaviour?
The victims of grooming gangs deserve action, not just words, as does every woman and girl. Anger about abuse is justified – necessary – but let it be real anger. Let it demand systemic change and justice, not serve as a distraction or vehicle for hate.
Women deserve better than this. They deserve justice, safety, and real solutions. Until then, the outrage is just noise.