The grooming gangs inquiry coverage has been deeply flawed, with corporate media spearheading vicious xenophobia. They’ve jumped at the opportunity to attack migrant communities, spewing Islamophobia whilst not actually paying attention to the facts of the grooming gangs themselves.
Far-right misogynists like Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, and Nigel Farage have used the grooming gang cases to leverage yet more anti-migrant sentiments, inflame public tensions, and paint whole communities of Pakistanis and Muslims as rapists. They’ve done all this whilst erasing the survivors of sexual violence and grooming perpetrated by men of all races – brown, white, or otherwise.
The truth is, failure to safeguard girls and women in England is a flaw of the British government and the British media. Instead, what has unfolded has been a toxic and pernicious attempt to conflate all rape, particularly through organised grooming gangs, as solely the domain of Pakistani and Muslim communities.
Grooming gang inquiry is a litany of failures
Even the grooming gang inquiry itself has, horrifically, further pushed aside survivors. Women on the inquiry panel made it clear they were uncomfortable with the idea of police or social workers being involved in any capacity. This comes as little surprise, given that End Violence Against Women reported that:
73% of rape survivors say police treatment worsened their mental health.
And, the media is hardly any better, as writer Emilie Buchwald described rape culture as:
A society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality is seen as violent.
Undoubtedly, corporate media has a significant role to play in upholding said rape culture. They had the perfect opportunity to examine why police, in particular, are central to facilitating rape culture. Doing so would have helped to shift public narrative in a manner that centred the experiences of survivors.
Racialisation of rape culture
However, the media is culpable for much more, still. We’ve all seen the headlines, splashed across front pages, that align grooming gangs as solely the reserve of Pakistanis and Muslims. But, there were no such headlines about the grooming of Shamima Begum and her now murdered friends Kadiza Sultana and the missing Amira Abase.
The three girls were groomed, trafficked, and handed on a plate to ISIS. There were multiple state failings that led to this. Rather than being treated as a victim of grooming and trafficking, Shamima has become a pariah in the UK. A denial of her experience would have been one thing, but the British state removed her citizenship – leaving her stateless.
Surely those who feel strongly about grooming of teenage girls, should be concerned about failing all teenage children. Survivors are not treated equitably by the media: white girls are ‘groomed’ but brown girls are ‘radicalised.’
British negligence from the state supported child trafficking of Shamima Begum. But, it was the media that manufactured consent for constructing the narrative that Shamima had been ‘radicalised,’ rather than groomed. These girls were failed by Britain, not Bangladesh, or any other country their parents were born in. If the school girls were white, there would have been uproar. And, even when it comes to white victims of grooming, as the current sham of an inquiry shows, even those survivors are being abandoned by the media in favour of a breathlessly racist focus on brown men as the sole savage rapists.
Sidelining of survivors
The ideas that solely men from South Asian and African communities are inherently sexually abusive towards children and women is deeply flawed. White survivors are also detrimentally affected by this racist rape culture. When a white survivor of sexual assault got onto a podium at a far-right march and said she had been raped by middle aged white men, the microphone was ripped from her hands. She was heckled, and quickly rushed off stage. Empathy towards her was dismissed from the crowd and the media, as her lived experience did not fit their agenda of scapegoating migrant communities as the sole perpetrators of sexual violence.
If they were genuinely concerned about the wellbeing of brave young woman who stepped forward to share her experience, they would have treated her with compassion and sensitivity. Instead, political point scoring is the name of the game. The girl who spoke up at the rally was perceived as a nuisance to be shoved out of sight, and out of mind. The men present were not sensitive towards the abuse of young women and girls. Instead, they were more interested in the ethnicity of the perpetrator fitting a specific narrative.
Mainstream media has a responsibility here
Mainstream media has been focused on sensationalism and creating divisions across Britain. Suddenly migrants in hotels become the issue at hand, men from Global South communities in Britain become the sole boogeyman and the root of the problem.
The jurisdiction of the inquiry should be scrutinised for resources to be utilised productively, instead of a PR exercise where recommendations are shelved, and never heard from again. The inquiry not having the power to prosecute any perpetrators is the typical merry-go-round of inquiries in Britain: offering solutions with no haste or appetite to implement them. This is further evidence, were it needed, that the safeguarding of children from all groomers online and in-person is not being taken seriously.
For mainstream British media to have genuine concern towards survivors, it is vitally important survivors of grooming by perpetrators of all ethnicities are taken just as seriously. Mainstream media newsrooms are rushing to spotlight only stories of rape when perpetrated by men of colour. Of course, this haste is only present when the rapists involved are Pakistani or East African, or from somewhere else in the Global South.
That is undoubtedly an example of racist rape culture which damages survivors of all races.
Featured image via the Canary
