By J. Spooner & J.Stubbs

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮 “BBC Radio News with Julie Candler: Six members of a grooming-gang were convicted for a combined total of 87 years in Birmingham Crown Court today for offences against twelve girls, ranging in ages from 12 to 16. In sentencing, Judge Ferguson accused the evil gang members of preying on the vulnerable young girls from local care homes, to whom they had done irreparable damage.”𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

Close your eyes. Visualise the appearance of the groomers. What ethnicity are they?

The fictional BBC Radio example serves to illustrate the power of the media to inject racial biases into the collective consciousness. The imported dark-skinned savages with uncontrollable libidos preying on white girls trope has been a mainstay of white supremacist propaganda throughout. Having existed solely on the radical fringes of the right, UK newspaper The Times have helped elevate this stereotype into the mainstream with their creation of the Asian “grooming gang”.

Their method of manipulation is helped explained by The Blind Men and the Elephant, an ancient Hindu parable which describes a number of blind men who have never encountered an elephant before, each touching a different section of an elephant’s body to learn what an elephant is. Naturally, each man, limited in his knowledge to the tail, or the leg or the tusk and so on, differs in his subjective truths to the next man. No man has complete context as each man has his perception limited.

It is in this manner, but by design, that The Times has implanted the racial stereotype of the Asian grooming-gang into our national psyche. They have achieved this through lying-by-omission, race-specific application of terms, and zooming in on crimes by British Asians while simultaneously zooming out on crimes by white British.

Whether it be right-wing media promoting this racially-fueled connotation, or left-wing outlets protesting against it, the term ‘Grooming Gang’ is now used across the board. But how objective is it really? How much do we really know about this specific label? What are the caveats for this term to be applied? Where did the term come from? We know from our previous research on the fraudulent 2017 Quilliam report, that there are groups of white offenders grooming and sexually assaulting children, but are these considered ‘Grooming Gangs’ as well? And if so, more importantly, where are all these white ‘grooming gangs’?

Origins of the Asian Grooming Gang

On the 5th of January, 2011, The Times newspaper launched an exclusive four-page exposé on the “sexual exploitation of hundreds of young British girls by criminal pimping gangs”. The article claimed that “child protection experts” had identified a separate category of sex offending which The Times labelled “on-street grooming”, and that within this profile “most of the victims are white” and that “most of the convicted offenders are of Pakistani heritage”. The politically-conservative newspaper revealed that its own investigation even had the statistics to back these findings up. The exclusive declared:

“The Times has identified 17 court prosecutions since 1997, 14 of them during the past three years, involving the on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16 by groups of men. The victims came from 13 towns and cities and in each case two or more men were convicted of offences.In total, 56 people, with an average age of 28, were found guilty of crimes including rape, child abduction, indecent assault and sex with a child. Three of the 56 were white, 53 were Asian. Of those, 50 were Muslim and a majority were members of the British Pakistani community…”

The hysteria-inducing Times investigation exclusive broke on the 5th of January, 2011.

Inevitably, within no time, the story had ignited national hysteria. Over the following days, all major news outlets covered the story, as well as radio talk-back shows and websites. That same week, The Times doubled down heavily, with further front page ‘scoops’, opinion pieces, web-chats and letters to the editor all relating back to the initial investigation. From our counting, they ran at least twenty articles on the topic of ‘on-street grooming’ in the following seven days to accompany their initial exclusive. Among the many others who pounced on this story, the Daily Mail ran seven articles in the following twelve days all referring back to the alleged Asian connection discovered by The Times.

Astutely, the Times’ investigation was released in the same week as the conclusion of a high profile court case, in which a group of Asian males were sentenced for CSE related offences. Needless to say, the media went even further into overdrive. BBC Newsnight ran a special where former Home Secretary Jack Straw warned that white British girls were being targeted as “easy meat” by their British-Pakistani predators. The Times continued, relentlessly pushing articles reiterating the ethnic connection between ‘on-street grooming’ and British-Pakistani men in a manner which the Huffington Post later described as a “desperate” effort “to see the ‘Asian model’ recognised as a distinct category of CSE”. They also wasted no time getting hold of British PM David Cameron, at the first opportunity drawing comments from him in which he gave his support to “pursue pimp gangs ‘without fear or favour’”.

Within the space of a month, the new head of Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Command was stood in front of his funders at the Home Office, promising to focus further research and resources to “concerns originally exposed in The Times”. The following is a transcript of this conversation at the House of Commons meeting between the Home Affairs Committee and CEOP head Peter Davies, just three weeks following The Times’ exclusive:

Chair: Indeed, I think you made that very clear. Can I move on to a current piece of work that you’re doing, the issue of child grooming? Following the public concerns originally exposed in The Times newspaper, was it you who decided to conduct this research or did the Home Office ask you to conduct the investigation into child grooming? Peter Davies: I decided that it was part of CEOP’s role to understand problems such as this and it was my decision. Chair: So you read about it in the newspapers; you saw the controversy and you decided that there should be an investigation? Peter Davies: That was one of the elements. There were other elements going on at the time as well that prompted the decision. But yes, it was my decision.

In a clear example of media influence shaping official responses, just after this meeting CEOP launched its first investigation into ‘localised grooming’.

Following this came another CEOP report in 2013, undertaken alongside further Home Affairs Committee investigations and Government recommendations. Davies’ arm was being twisted by the combined forces of Rupert Murdoch and the British tabloid press to react, not to child sexual exploitation holistically, but to this new menace, whose crimes were uniquely Asian. Yet what makes this influence even more striking, and what went largely unnoticed, is that The Times’ original investigation was intrinsically flawed.

The investigation was heavily criticised by the very experts whose research The Times had cited, or “de-contextualised” in an attempt to add weight to their own report — sexual exploitation and human trafficking researchers at University College London, Dr Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley. Within two days of the story breaking and their research cited within it, Cockbain and Brayley wrote to The Times, warning their readers to not “to be blinded by this emergent and untested racial stereotype”, which was crudely being exploited by The Times. Furthermore, additional criticisms of the investigation were:

17 cases over 14 years did not make up the “tidal wave” of offending that it stated was taking place.

The investigation failed to justify or explain how it came to decide on their criteria for selecting some cases and not others.

The criteria eventually chosen appeared biased towards Asian offenders. Almost like the author looked at where Asian offenders were most prevalent, and based his criteria on what their offending all had in common.

The investigation relied on taking the author/researcher at his word on his results, rather than showing any clear methodology or evidence of data gathering.

The author/researcher only included cases he could ‘identify’, whatever that means.

Dr Cockbain herself made the following remarks referring to The Times investigation:

“Findings from an exploratory academic study were cited in support, despite the authors publicly emphasising that their (unpublished) work, focusing on two cases alone, had been de-contextualised and deliberately ‘over-extended to characterise an entire crime type” “ These inclusion parameters (of the Times Investigation) have never been explained or justified, despite the questionable decision to exclude male victims wholesale. This raises the question as to whether the statistical exercise was deliberately designed to isolate evidence for a predetermined ‘Asian model”

From Cockbain’s various responses to The Times’ investigation and its subsequent ‘grooming-gang’ coverage, it was clear she was unhappy at how her research had been misrepresented by them.

Cockbain pondered if The Times had set out to purposely manipulate their research as to fix the results to isolate only Asian offenders. In another piece, she and fellow CSE specialist Brayley lamented The Times as being “the inventor of the spurious crime category of ‘on-street grooming’”.

Similarly, Libby Brooks of the Guardian lashed out at shoddy nature of the investigation, stating:

“The efforts of the Times to stand up this investigation are certainly considerable: selectively quoting or misquoting some groups, and inventing a category of “on-street grooming” that does not exist in law and was not recognised by any of the agencies I spoke to. It is also worth asking how responsible it is to provide ammunition to the violent racist extremists already active in these areas on such flawed evidence.”

Additionally, from our own research, we have found multiple cases of white offenders convicted in ‘on-street grooming’ incidents that that The Times apparently could not. Even though their investigation failed to justify the parameters used for the cases it selected, we believe that we have found many cases of white offenders which still fit within them. Yet The Times’s investigation curiously declared:

“With the exception of one case involving two white men in Blackburn, The Times has been unable to identify any court case in which two or more white British, Kurdish, African-Caribbean or Bangladeshi men have been convicted of child-sex offences linked to on-street grooming.”

We found ample evidence to the contrary. The following are a few, but not all, of the cases we believe were either ignored or incompetently ‘not identified’ by The Times:

In a nutshell, The Times orchestrated public outrage and facilitated government responses via a relentless campaign that revolved around a highly flawed investigation and a self-invented category of CSE. When referring to the investigation and its follow ups, The Times would later boast, taking credit for their ‘discovery’:

The many stories written…have revealed a crime model that police and care agencies refused to recognise.

This specific “crime model” has since evolved in the media headlines and discourse over the years, now commonly referred to as ‘Grooming Gangs’.