A landmark report into “grooming gangs” that sexually exploited mostly white, working-class British girls on an industrial scale has omitted any reference to the Islamist links or motivations of the overwhelmingly Muslim perpetrators.
Why is there barely any reference to the need to assess the religious drivers behind these abhorrent crimes?
While identifying clear evidence of disproportionately “over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men,” the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, published by the Home Office on June 16, focuses on the offenders’ ethnicity rather than on their religion.
The identification of the perpetrators as “Asian” and “Pakistani” in the report authored by Baroness Louise Casey has angered Sikhs, Hindus, and Christians of Pakistani heritage, as well as Asians from other countries, who asked the government to specify the religion of the suspects.
It also ignores copious evidence from victims’ courtroom testimonies about how attitudes of Islamist supremacism and Islamist prejudices against non-Muslims played in the sexual abuse of more than 250,000 white working-class girls in at least 50 British towns and cities since 2001.
Report Admits Obfuscation of Perpetrators’ Identities
Ironically, the 197-page report, commissioned by U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in January 2025, acknowledges that “questions about ethnicity have been asked but dodged for years.” It laments that “the ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.”
“Instead of examination, we have seen obfuscation,” Casey admits. “This does no one any favours at all, and least of all those in the Asian, Pakistani or Muslim communities who needlessly suffer as those with malicious intent use this obfuscation to sow and spread hatred.”
Casey also cites a 2015 review by the Oxfordshire Safeguarding Children’s Partnership, which specifically “recommends further research into why a significant proportion of people convicted were of ‘Pakistani and/or Muslim heritage.’” The review suggested that “relevant government departments should research why this is the case, in order to guide prevention strategies.”
Despite this, her report mentions “Islam” only once, “Muslims” nineteen times, and “Asian” 116 times. Most of the references to “Muslims” are bibliographical or references to Muslim women and children.
Expert Provides Data on Islamist Links to Abuse
Speaking to Focus on Western Islamism, Islamic scholar Tim Dieppe, who has written extensively on grooming gangs, pointed out that the report made only one reference to “the need to examine further cultural and religious drivers behind child sexual exploitation.”
Dieppe, author of the book The Challenge of Islam: Understanding and Responding to Islam’s Increasing Influence in the UK, elaborated:
Dieppe, who is head of public policy at Christian Concern, explained that his research into victims’ testimonies had provided ample evidence of “why the Islamic connection with these crimes is significant.”
‘It was like I was arguing with God’
A key example of Islamist links comes from a Rotherham grooming-gang victim, who testified:
The victim said that “all of the sexual abuse” she experienced was linked to “spiritual abuse or religious abuse,” and explained how “religious scriptures were used as tools of control to force me to conform to their will.”
“Every time they quoted scripture, it was very hard to argue with; to them it was like I was arguing with God,” she added. “To me it was actually like I was arguing with the devil. They used their so-called ‘religious moral authority’ to do the most horrific, immoral acts imaginable.”
The victim “was told that Muslim girls are good and pure, and stay virgins until marriage, but all the white girls are slags, and they sleep with hundreds of people.” White girls “don’t obey Allah” and “don’t dress modestly,” so “they deserve to be punished.”
Dieppe documents instances of victims being “forced into sharia marriages, forced to read the Qur’an, forced to have abortions, and told that Islamic doctrine justifies their abuse.” He notes that religion “has been studiously avoided in previous inquiries and reports into the subject.”
Sikhs and Christians Object to Generalizations
Have courage and acknowledge that it’s Pakistani Islamists and not everyone of Pakistani origin.
In a January letter to the Home Secretary, Britain’s Network of Sikh Organizations UK pointed out the grooming gangs’ Islamist links, noting how “one victim talks of a perpetrator reciting the Koran during her abuse” and justifying the abuse “because of her lower status as a non-Muslim.”
“Another victim was forced into sharia marriages and treated like a sex slave – a social worker is alleged to have attended a sharia marriage,” the NSOUK letter states. “All this points not only point to cultural drivers, but also religious and racial drivers.”
The NSOUK explained how the Casey report should have considered “the appalling treatment of girls from minority faiths in Pakistan — where Christian, Hindu and Sikh girls are kidnapped, forced to convert to Islam and married, to get an understanding of the underlying motivations.”
“We cannot shy away from the irrefutable truth that non-Muslim girls are considered fair game by some perpetrators, by virtue of the fact they are kuffars (a derogatory term for non-Muslims),” the letter noted.
In comments to FWI, a spokesperson for NSOUK said:
Fr. Joshua Salas, a Lutheran missionary and pastor of Pakistani heritage, told FWI that he was “offended by the report claiming the perpetrators were Pakistanis, because I am a Pakistani Christian, and you cannot generalize such behavior to include Pakistanis of all faiths.”
“There are many cases of sexual abuse in my country, committed by Muslims on Christian, Hindu, and Kaleshi women,” Salas said. “Have courage and acknowledge that it’s Pakistani Islamists and not everyone of Pakistani origin.”
Academics Object to Stereotyping Muslims
Leading voices, however, have objected to identifying the perpetrators as Muslims. A peer-reviewed paper in the journal Race & Class warns that “the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ trope has enduring currency among rightwing and liberal political elites and, if left unchecked, risks fuelling further racialised and alarmist news coverage and informing misguided and harmful responses.”
The researchers, Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufai, lament the stereotyping of Muslim men “as both religiously fanatical and prone to committing violent, sexual acts motivated by a patriarchal, misogynistic culture and backward, barbaric religion.”
“Culturalist, essentialist explanations of why Muslim men sexually abuse children must be rejected,” the authors conclude. Instead, “the ‘grooming gangs’ discourse should be addressed by a genuine engagement with anti-racist feminism perspectives.”
