It is always interesting to watch a dam burst. In the past week, as Elon Musk and other prominent Americans discovered the British ‘grooming gang’ scandal, British politics has suddenly had to face up to something it has spent a quarter of a century trying to ignore. One would hope that the claim that thousands of underage girls had been gang-raped by thousands of men in cities across the country would be a subject of profound concern for our politicians. Who did this? Why? How can we help the victims and prevent any reoccurrence?
But no society asks questions to which it does not want an answer. The language used about this mass crime has been coyly euphemistic. Take ‘grooming’. Can you say that the girl in Oxford who was repeatedly drugged and raped by men who threatened to kill her and branded her buttocks with ‘M’ for ‘Mohammed’ was merely ‘groomed’?
