It was in the early 2000s in England that stories that the Sikh and white working-class communities had been telling for years were finally investigated by the media. These revealed that the organised grooming of often underage young girls by gangs of Muslim men of North African or Pakistani background was a theme in towns throughout the north of England and further afield. In each case the local police had been too scared to look into the issue, and when the media finally looked into it they too shied away. A 2004 documentary on social services in Bradford had its screening postponed after self-proclaimed ‘anti-fascists’ and local police chiefs appealed to Channel 4 to drop the documentary. The sections that dealt with the sexual exploitation of white girls by ‘Asian’ gangs were accused of being potentially inflammatory. In particular, these authorities insisted, the screening ahead of local elections could assist the British National Party at the polls. The documentary was finally screened months after the elections. But everything about this case and the details that followed provided a microcosm of a problem and a reaction which were going to spread across Europe.

Campaigning on, or even mentioning, the issue of grooming during those years brought with it terrible problems. When the northern Labour MP Ann Cryer took up the issue of the rape of underage girls in her own constituency, she was swiftly and widely denounced as an ‘Islamophobe’ and a ‘racist’, and at one stage had to receive police protection. It took years for central government, the police, local authorities or the Crown Prosecution Service to face up to the issue. When they finally began to do so, an official inquiry into abuse in the town of Rotherham alone revealed the exploitation of at least 1,400 children over the period 1997–2014. The victims were all non-Muslim white girls from the local community, with the youngest victim aged 11. All had been brutally raped, some had also been doused in petrol and threatened with being set on fire. Others were threatened with guns and forced to watch the violent rape of other girls as a warning should they tell anyone about the abuse. The inquiry into the abuse found that although the perpetrators were almost all men of Pakistani origin, operating in gangs, staff of the local council described their ‘nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.’ The local police were also found to have failed to act for fear of accusations of ‘racism’ and of what this might do to community relations.20