Brendan O’Neill

Has Keir Starmer watched Groomed: A National Scandal yet?

• 1 May 2025, 11:04am

I look forward to Keir Starmer hosting a special summit on the Channel 4 documentary, Groomed. And to hearing him gush about it every time a reporter puts a mic anywhere near his mouth. And to seeing his proposals for showing it to teens in schools across the land in order that we might prise open their innocent eyes to the dangers of so-called grooming gangs.

These girls were sacrificed at the altar of preserving the ideology of multiculturalism

After all, he did all that for Adolescence, a Netflix drama about a made-up crime against a fictional working-class girl. So surely he’ll do it for a documentary that lays out in grim, eye-watering detail the industrial-scale horrors that were inflicted on real working-class girls by gangs of mostly Muslim men in towns across England.

Groomed: A National Scandal aired on Channel 4 last night. It is a searing piece of journalism, a fearless document of the barbarism of the rape gangs and the unforgivable nonchalance of officials who looked the other way. Director Anna Hall deserves every accolade for getting this film out there, in the face of a cultural elite that would rather talk about anything else on earth than the brutalisation of white working-class girls by Muslim men.

Watching Groomed is an enraging experience. I think Hall intends it to be. It focuses on five young women who survived the gangs. We learn they were passed around like pieces of meat. Chantelle, 32, recounts being groomed from

the age of 11, when she was in a children’s home. Sometimes she was kept in a hotel room for days on end and ‘passed about’ between Pakistani men in their 20s and 30s. This went on for years.

Another girl, Erin, was groomed from the age of 12. The police were utterly uninterested in her suffering. One time, Erin was covered in signs of extreme abuse — she had ‘bite marks [from] head to toe’. Her underpants were full of semen. Her mother, desperate, took her to the police. They didn’t act. Later, a social services report called Erin a girl ‘who frequently puts herself at risk’. It was victim-blaming of the most sick-making variety.

Horrendously, many of the girls were essentially blamed for their own abuse, for their own violent debasement. Social services called them ‘promiscuous girls’. They were referred to as ‘child prostitutes’. The moral pygmies and shameless cowards of officialdom were so determined to keep a lid on this scandal that they came to see the girls, rather than the men, as the villains, as the authors of their own terrible fates.

And then there was the racism card, the chief means by which discussion of these horrors was suppressed for so long. Local protest groups said the rape-gang members were victims of racism and were only being investigated because they were Muslims. In much of the liberal media and across the left, the cry went up: it’s ‘Islamophobic’ to say there is a specific problem of Muslim grooming gangs.

But there was. In town after town. As Groomed documents in chilling detail, there was a ‘pattern’ of just such abuse: Muslim gangs exploiting what they viewed as the ‘slags’ of the white working class. There was a gross racial and religious supremacy in this decades-long crusade of misogynistic abuse. The social workers, cops, columnists and politicians who for years ignored or downplayed this scandal were not ‘fighting racism’ — they were condemning working-class girls to suffering.

What they called ‘anti-racism’ was in truth classism, a haughty and inhuman lack of concern for the violent subjugation of thousands of girls whose only

‘crime’ was that they were from the wrong side of the tracks. The silence of officials and intellectuals was a species of complicity. It aided and abetted the monsters who abused some of the most vulnerable girls in our society.

Even the Guardian now seems to get it. Its review of Groomed acknowledges that, for some, avoiding the charge of ‘racism’ took precedence over stopping girls from ‘being beaten, raped and trafficked’. That’s what some of us have been saying for years, and guess what we were called? Yes, racist.

This was the grossest accomplishment of identity politics: to depict concern for working-class girls as ‘bigotry’. To damn as ‘Islamophobes’ people whose only concern was to defend white working-class girls from Muslim gangs. These girls were sacrificed at the altar of preserving the ideology of multiculturalism. Their safety, their dignity, their very lives were seen as less important than that political imperative.

It’s this that makes the rape-gang scandal the greatest calamity of the postwar era. Everyone who was involved in this violent outrage against the working class should hang their heads in shame, from the perpetrators who did it, to the cops who ignored it, to the columnists who made excuses for it.

So, Prime Minister, have you watched Groomed? Will you be calling for it to be shown in schools and colleges? When will you be meeting with Hall and her heroic colleagues to discuss their work? And when will you be instituting the national inquiry into these horrors that everyone but the most morally blind now knows we need?

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Brendan O’Neill

Brendan O’Neill is Spiked's chief politics writer. His new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now.