The story of Rotherham, like that of a whole series of similar cases in towns across Britain, partly emerged because a couple of journalists were determined to bring the story out. But all the time the communities from which the men came showed no willingness to confront the problem and every desire to cover it up. Even at the courts after sentencing, families of those accused claimed that the whole thing was a government stitch-up of some kind.21 When one Muslim in the north of England spoke out against the gang rape of white girls by members of his own community, he said that he received death threats from fellow Muslims in Britain for saying so.22

Everywhere the story was the same. Girls were chosen, in the words of the judges who eventually presided over the trials, because they were from a different community, were non-Muslim and were regarded as ‘easy meat’. Many of the men had brought ideas about women and especially about unaccompanied or ‘unprotected’ women with them from Pakistan and other male-dominated Muslim cultures. In the face of such attitudes towards women being expressed in the United Kingdom, every part of the British state failed to stand up for what had been British norms, including the rule of law. The kindest explanation would be that the influx of huge numbers of people from such cultures made the authorities nervous as to where to draw their own lines. But it was more than that. Every time grooming scandals occurred it transpired that the local authorities turned a blind eye for fear of causing community problems or being accused of racism. The British police remained scarred from the Macpherson Report of 1999, which had charged them with ‘institutional racism’, and feared any repeat of that accusation.

Everywhere in Western Europe the same truth came out at least equally slowly, often at almost precisely the same moment as the taboo shattered in Britain. In each country the period of silence was assisted by the refusal of the authorities to keep or break down any crime statistics based on ethnicity or religion. In 2009 police in Norway revealed that immigrants from non-Western backgrounds were responsible for ‘all reported rapes’ in Oslo.23 In 2011 the Norwegian state’s statistical bureau was willing to note that ‘immigrants are overrepresented in the crime statistics’. They did, however, also suggest that this was not due to any cultural differences, but rather perhaps to the predominance of young men among the immigrant populations. One former head of the violent crime section of the Oslo Police Department, Hanne Kristin Rohde, testified to the extraordinary unwillingness of the Norwegian authorities to admit to what was happening. In relation to the ‘clear statistical connection’ between rapes and migrants who came from cultures where ‘women have no value of their own’, she said that ‘This was a big problem but it was difficult to talk about it.’ As for the rapists’ attitudes towards women, ‘It is a cultural problem,’ said Rohde.24