It’s the scandal that refuses to die. Despite the best efforts of our spineless elites – who’d rather talk about anything on Earth other than grooming gangs – it keeps creeping back. For all the left’s cheap, libellous cries about how racist it is to talk about these gangs, people keep talking about them. In the face of official indifference to the suffering of thousands of poor and working-class girls at the hands of these groomers and abusers, people have demanded a reckoning. There is a public thirst for truth, and no amount of top-down slander and censure can crush it.

Three days into 2025, grooming gangs are back in the news. As British readers will know, ‘grooming gangs’ is the somewhat euphemistic name given to those marauding bands of men from mostly Pakistani backgrounds who subjected girls of the white working class to horrific abuse. In towns across the UK – Rotherham, Rochdale, Huddersfield, Oldham, Telford, Oxford – gangs of men plied girls with drugs, demeaned them, exploited them, raped them. Conservative MP Robert Jenrick has a point when he says the flat phrase ‘grooming gangs’ seems designed to ‘sanitise depraved crimes’. They’re ‘rape gangs’, he says.

They were. The girls who fell victim to these gangs experienced the most hellish degradation. The men ‘deliver[ed] them to hell’, as one prosecutor put it. In Huddersfield, girls were ‘passed around and raped’. In Manchester, a girl was injected with heroin to make her easier to rape. In Rochdale, a girl called Ruby was raped a hundred times from the age of 12. She had an abortion at 13. There were thousands of victims: 1,400 in Rotherham, 1,000 in Telford, more than 300 in Oxford. It was an industry of sexual violence.

What made these horrors even worse – and in some cases what made them possible – was the calculated indifference of officialdom. Across England, local politicians and cops were initially loath to dig into the gangs, lest they stir up ‘sensitive community issues’. They knew very well that gangs of men from Pakistani backgrounds were preying on white girls from the dirt-poor parts of town, but they held back because they didn’t want to be seen as ‘targeting [a] minority group’. In town after town, ‘race relations’ were elevated above the safety and dignity of working-class girls. Protecting the ideology of multiculturalism was seen as more important than protecting girls from rape. The girls were sacrificed to ideology, their humiliation treated as a small price to pay for upholding the edicts of political correctness.