The “grooming gangs” scandal (calling them “rape gangs” would be more accurate) has resurfaced, largely thanks to a New Year’s Day report about Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips declining to commission a Home Office-led inquiry into historic child exploitation in Oldham. The decision was based on the grounds that it is a job for “Oldham Council alone”.

As the issue has returned to national salience, many who have hitherto shown zero interest in condemning child sexual abuse have put themselves at the forefront of the debate. X owner Elon Musk has lobbied for the release of activist Tommy Robinson, who has erroneously been credited for uncovering the scandal. In fact, Musk’s hero, far from breaking the rape gangs story, almost scuppered the 2018 trial of several men who had carried out horrific acts of sexual violence on a number of girls.

I have been campaigning alongside parents of organised child sexual abuse victims in Leeds since the late-Nineties. The Coalition for the Removal of Pimping was set up by a mother, Irene Ivison, concerned about girls aged 13 or 14 being picked up and coerced into “relationships” with older men, then pimped out to friends and business associates across the city. The same had happened to Ivison’s teenage daughter, who was then murdered. Eventually, the parents behind the organisation piqued the interest of a filmmaker, who made a documentary about it for Channel 4 called Edge of the City.

Due to be screened in May 2004, the film was pulled just hours before transmission because the British National Party advertised it as a “party political broadcast”. The Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police claimed it might trigger race riots, and that it would therefore be dangerous to screen. I was extremely familiar with the story the film told: huge numbers of vulnerable young girls were being sexually abused and pimped out by organised gangs of men, most of whom were Pakistani Muslim. Partly thanks to the BNP’s actions, these men’s horrific crimes were denied broader exposure.

Similarly tragic is the case of Charlene Downes, who was targeted by organised pimping gangs in Blackpool in the early 2000s. I began looking at the story of her disappearance in 2004, a year after she went missing. Charlene was abused in exchange for vodka and cigarettes by a number of men who ran takeaways in an area of Blackpool referred to as “Paki Alley” because the residents were primarily brown-skinned foreigners. The added tragedy of her story was that she had already been abused by dozens of white men before ending up in the hands of the Pakistani men. Why didn’t the Right speak up when such girls were being abused by white British men?

The question remains as to what should be done. Is yet another inquiry, on top of the Rochdale and Rotherham ones, any more likely to yield results? After all, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which published its final report a little over two years ago, was barely reported on, and many of its recommendations have yet to be implemented.

What is needed instead is proper investment into all strands of the criminal justice system, so that perpetrators can be detected and prosecuted. There should never be room for the type of cultural relativism that leads to certain groups of men getting away with child rape. But neither should we ignore the fact that throughout history, victims of this heinous crime rarely get justice, whoever the perpetrator.

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Julie Bindel is an investigative journalist, author, and feminist campaigner. Her latest book is Lesbians: Where are we now? She also writes on Substack.

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