The ‘grooming gangs’ delusion is finally being shattered

The re-eruption of the rape gangs scandal has shone a dazzlingly bright light on the language that makes us flinch and fluster, and clutch at euphemistic straws. For years, the mass sexual abuse of thousands of vulnerable girls in towns across England has been blamed on ‘grooming gangs’. But this euphemism hardly does justice to this appalling scandal.

In the last fortnight, there has been a shift to a different, more accurate term – ‘rape gangs’ – that better describes who was responsible. This change in terminology is long overdue. And while it offers few crumbs of comfort to the victims, it is good that people are – finally – beginning to face up to the facts of a story that shames modern Britain.

The grooming aspect of the crimes is, no doubt, an important factor. But ‘grooming’ is too soft and obscuring and polite a term that allows us to bury our heads in the sand of what happened in living memory in our country. Grooming is something that happens to poodles in parlours. It does not confront the full horror of the crimes involved. It allows our eyes and ears to slide away. It’s a deceit that the polite middle classes have willingly participated in.

The description of the racial identity of the perpetrators – who have for years been described as ‘Asian’ – is another example of the way we’ve allowed language to fail to fully describe this scandal. ‘Asian grooming gangs’ is a mealy-mouthed phrase; it’s fooled nobody with its attempt at nicety and avoidance. We all know what that word means in that context, to the extent that it’s been part of the frantic looking away and covering up the hard and very unpleasant and difficult truth. 

Reform MP Rupert Lowe, who has eschewed the normal use of words of avoidance, labelling the perpetrators ‘Pakistani gangs’, has caused several other MPs and commentators to have conniptions, rolling their eyes and almost literally clutching at their pearls.

This reluctance of using the word Pakistani in this context is something that has evolved gradually over recent years in modern Britain. Our fear of offending others has left us terrified of using terms to identify a person, or group’s, background, even when this is an accurate way of describing them. The taboo about the simple descriptor ‘Pakistani’ has snowballed since my childhood. Hearing it used – in any context – still makes me feel like I’m in a plummeting lift, containing as it does its diminutive form, the use of which correlates with violence and racism. When I was a child, older people often casually spoke of ‘Paki shops’ with no trace of opprobrium. It was an appalling term that we now rightly see as unacceptable. But there’s no doubt that this realisation has made people in Britain squeamish about even using the word ‘Pakistani’.

It’s precisely this kind of nicety and squeamishness – when applied to simple descriptors, in fact – that is a part of what has enabled the rape gang scandal to fester so dangerously.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting recently had an attack of the vapours, telling the Guardian that ‘irresponsible and coarse public discourse’ might incite mass violence. Hang on. ‘Don’t say anything or the proles will kick off’ is surely a big reason why the rape gangs got away with it for so long in the first place. Mass violence – the rapes and any number of terrorist outrages – has already occurred in Britain. And while Streeting condemns what happened as ‘sickening’, why does he seem so concerned, in Minority Report-style, about future crimes that might happen – maybe, possibly – rather than crimes that actually have been or are actually being committed?

This fear ties in with another factor: the class-ridden supposition that the British white working class has little self-control, and could go on a rampage at the drop of an ill-chosen sentence. My own connection to that background is – like Streeting’s – much eroded by years and custom, but that implication still makes me furious. The British white working class have, in fact, behaved pretty impeccably considering the provocations, the constant goading from their supposed betters over the years.

The last couple of weeks have been very strange; it’s as if everybody has woken up from a dream. The nonsense and self-delusion and moral cowardice over the rape gangs has been swept away, and it’s hard to pinpoint why. What we need now is hard, factual honesty, and if that means looking things square in the face and addressing problems by name, so be it. We can take it. And the survivors deserve it, at long last.