When Will We Have The Courage To Talk About the Men From Pakistan?

The rape gangs made up of men of Pakistani heritage were not driven by lust, impulse, or paedophilia. Their crimes were acts of prejudice and power, not passion. These were deliberate expressions of domination rooted in racial contempt and cultural hierarchy. Sexual violence was their weapon, not their motive.

These men operated within a worldview that divided women into categories of purity and impurity, respect and contempt. Within that hierarchy, White working class girls, often vulnerable, isolated, and without social protection, were seen as beneath consideration. They were not viewed as children to be safeguarded, but as unclean outsiders whose degradation carried no moral weight.

The assaults were not random or opportunistic. They followed an internal logic, an assertion of power over a despised group. Rape became a symbolic act, a declaration of control, a means of confirming moral dominance over those they regarded as inferior. This was domination masked as desire, an assertion of supremacy, not sexuality.

You cannot understand this through the narrow lens of sexual deviance or paedophilia. It was a crime of hierarchy, a collision between a patriarchal honour culture and a society that had ceased to defend its most vulnerable members.

The men responsible saw themselves not as predators acting outside their culture's norms, but as men enforcing them. In their worldview, purity and honour were attributes reserved for "their own" women, while outsiders existed beyond the boundaries of empathy. The victims' perceived impurity made them suitable targets, their suffering both permissible and deserved.

Historical Continuities. Rape as a Weapon of Purity and Power

Sexual violence as domination has deep roots in the region. Pakistan's creation in 1947, one of the most violent ethnic cleansings in modern history, set a grim precedent. As millions fled across newly drawn borders, rape was systematically used as a weapon of revenge and purification. Women's bodies became battlegrounds on which competing visions of religion and nationhood were fought.

This was not incidental brutality. It reflected a worldview in which the "honour" of one group could be asserted through the violation of another. The act of rape carried symbolic meaning. It was the conquest of the enemy's women, and therefore the humiliation of the enemy's men. Sexual violence became a language of dominance and purification, justified as the restoration of moral order.

Two decades later, during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, the Pakistani military's campaign in East Pakistan saw rape elevated to genocide. Hundreds of thousands of Bengali women were subjected to systematic sexual violence, not for sexual gratification, but to ethnically cleanse and terrorise. The perpetrators viewed the victims as racially and culturally inferior, unworthy of protection or personhood.

These events left a moral scar that Pakistan has never acknowledged. There was no reckoning, no process of truth or accountability. The silence that followed entrenched a cultural pattern that sexual violence could be justified when directed against those outside the moral or religious community. It was an ideological silence, a refusal to see women, and especially other people's women, as human beings.

This inheritance matters. When sons of that diaspora settled in Britain, they carried not just religious identity but cultural memory, a hierarchy of purity and pollution shaped by centuries of social conflict. The grooming gang phenomenon was not an aberration, but the reappearance of an older logic of domination, transposed into the United Kingdom. And once here, the men involved found a fertile breeding ground to continue as was what they believed their tradition.

Institutional Fear and the Collapse of Moral Courage

The first failure was ideological. The second was institutional. For decades, police forces, local authorities, and safeguarding agencies failed to act decisively despite overwhelming evidence of organised sexual exploitation. They had the intelligence and investigative capability. What they lacked was moral courage.

Officials were paralysed by fear of being labelled racist. In a political environment obsessed with community cohesion and the optics of diversity, the race and religion of the perpetrators became a forbidden topic. Victims who spoke up were dismissed. Frontline officers were warned not to "stir up tensions." Social workers were told to consider the "cultural sensitivities" of the offenders.

What followed was bureaucratic cowardice disguised as anti racism. Institutions abandoned their duty of care to some of the most vulnerable children in the country because their abusers belonged to a protected demographic. In protecting themselves from accusations of prejudice, they allowed racial prejudice of a different kind, against poor, White, working class girls, to flourish unchecked.

This was not equality. It was a moral inversion. Fear of racism became a tool that shielded perpetrators from scrutiny and deepened the inequality between victim and offender. Political correctness, when elevated above principle, becomes not a safeguard against injustice but its enabler.

The Political Bargain That Protected Power

The institutional silence was reinforced by political calculation. In many northern towns, including Oldham, Rochdale, and Rotherham, electoral politics had become dependent on the loyalty of bloc votes within Pakistani heritage communities. These blocs were managed through networks of kinship, business, and patronage that rewarded compliance and punished dissent.

Local politicians understood that maintaining "community harmony" often meant maintaining the support of those who controlled these votes. In return for reliable electoral turnout, politicians offered influence, access, and protection. Issues that risked disrupting this balance, including the organised sexual exploitation of White working class girls, were treated as political threats, not safeguarding emergencies.

This relationship hollowed out democracy. Council seats and public positions were distributed through informal patronage systems that blurred the line between representation and control. The same intermediaries who could mobilise the vote were often the ones advising councillors on "community relations", a conflict of interest so normalised that few questioned it.

Anyone who challenged the arrangement risked being denounced as divisive or racist. The language of anti racism was repurposed to defend vested interests. "Community cohesion" became a euphemism for silence. The welfare of children was subordinated to the management of a political alliance.

This culture of political exchange explains why so many local authorities failed to confront what was happening on their own streets. It was not only cowardice but complicity, the institutionalisation of denial as the price for maintaining electoral peace. The grooming gang scandal was not only a moral or policing failure. It was a political failure rooted in the corruption of representation itself.

A Two Tier Morality

The third and most enduring failure is moral. By refusing to hold all communities to the same ethical standard, Britain has entrenched a hierarchy of accountability. When the offender is White and the victim is from a minority group, society demands structural explanations, cultural reckoning, and public shame. When the roles are reversed, the conversation collapses into evasion and denial.

This asymmetry corrodes trust. It tells one part of society that their suffering is negotiable, and another that their identity grants them immunity from moral examination. It fractures the very idea of equal justice.

The victims were not only failed by their abusers but by a system that calculated their worth through the lens of political risk. They were denied recognition because their pain was inconvenient. Their trauma was filtered through focus groups and equality impact assessments, rather than confronted as a national disgrace.

Confronting this honestly requires rejecting both denial and collective blame. The grooming gangs were not acting on behalf of all Pakistanis or Muslims, but nor were they isolated anomalies. They were products of specific cultural and ideological environments that must be named and challenged. Pretending otherwise serves no one, least of all the victims.

The Cover Up That Never Ended

The same fear and political cowardice that allowed these crimes to happen now defines the government's response to them. The National Inquiry was meant to expose the truth. Instead, it has become another act of management.

Survivors who once believed the inquiry would deliver justice have walked away, saying it was designed to protect institutions rather than expose them. Evidence has been ring fenced, language softened, and uncomfortable lines of questioning quietly erased.

This is not accountability. It is choreography. The state has learned to perform contrition while keeping the machinery of denial intact. Each new report repeats the same phrases, "systemic failure," "lessons learned," "moving forward", as if repetition were justice. What it achieves instead is distance. The further the inquiries go, the further the truth recedes.

The inquiry's retreat into managed caution mirrors the original betrayal. Once again, those who hold power speak of compassion while concealing the cause. The same instinct that told police officers to stay silent now guides Whitehall. Protect relationships, preserve reputations, and avoid offence at all costs.

Real justice will not come from committees or reviews. It will come only when the country stops managing the story and starts telling it, when it names who did this, why it was ignored, and who still benefits from silence.

The survivors who walked away from the inquiry understood something the rest of us refuse to see. You cannot heal a wound that the state refuses to admit exists. Their withdrawal was not despair. It was defiance. They have refused to play their assigned role in another performance of forgetting.

And so the burden returns to the rest of us. If the institutions built to tell the truth will not do it, then it falls to citizens to speak plainly. To confront what was done, to remember who was silenced, and to insist that moral equality means moral courage.

Until that happens, the estimated 100,000 betrayed girls will remain symbols of a nation still lying to itself. The inquiry has stalled. The cover up continues. It is a monument to fear, to cowardice, and to the terrible power of silence. No matter the cost. We must fight it.

This isn't about politics anymore. It's about preservation - a ruling clique defending its own survival, even if it means abandoning the very people they swore to protect.

The nation does not need silence. It needs truth. This is not only a child abuse scandal. It is a crisis of truth, trust and governance in modern Britain.

I am Raja Miah. For seven years, I led a small team that exposed how politicians protected the rape gangs. We cannot do this on our own. We need you to stand with us and help make sure the National Inquiry we have all fought for is not a whitewash.

We’re running out of time. Without the numbers, they will win. It’s as simple as that.

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• Raja Miah MBE