Dr Elle Cockbain is an Associate Professor in Security and Crime Science at University College London.

Dr Waqas Tufail is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University. Dr Waqas Tufail’s research interests include policing, anti-Muslim racism, and racialisation.

Apparently, Muslims are a race.

They have written a report together.  We have the perfect storm here; a Muslim and a left-wing academic writing a politically correct report.  The main thrust of the report is to minimise any claims of Muslim involvement,  or disproportionate Muslim involvement, in grooming gangs.

The report is filled with term “racism” in every form imaginable.  This includes “anti-Muslim racism”, which is repeated again and again.  Dr Waqas Tufail’s “expertise” in “racism” comes to the fore. It seems nearly every sentence has “racism” in it.

It is also filled with the usual accusations of “Islamophobia” or “far right”.

Here is my response.

This article examines how racist framings of ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ exist not only in extremist, far-right fringes but in mainstream, liberal discourses too. The involvement of supposedly feminist and liberal actors, and the promotion of pseudoscientific ‘research’, have lent a veneer of legitimacy to essentialist, Orientalist stereotypes of Muslim men, the demonisation of whole communities and demands for collective responsibility.

Because of the above “supposedly feminist” input, the report later introduces a different form of feminism that is apparently needed… called “anti-racist feminism”.

It seems western people have Muslim men all wrong!

The “Muslim victim card” is played straight away in the report’s introduction.

 “Home to a significant population of Asian Muslim heritage, workers from the Indian subcontinent initially arrived into towns such as Rotherham to work within the manufacturing sector and were often treated poorly in comparison to whites”.

“Despite routinely (and wrongly) being depicted as a ‘specific’ crime type, ‘grooming gangs’ are better understood as a vaguely and inconsistently defined subset of child sexual exploitation (CSE) offenders”.

A large component of CSE is online, where the offender does not touch the child. It is abhorrent, but compare it with the violent gang rape of a child.

Most online offenders are white, so by including grooming rape gangs in CSE, it serves to obfuscate the offence. Grooming gang rape needs to be included as a special category regarding the rape of children.

“Existing data simply do not enable reliable assessments of the prevalence or correlates of CSE, let alone those of ‘grooming gangs’ so claims of ethnic or religious disproportionality in ‘grooming gangs’ are just not testable in any meaningful sense”.  

There you have it.  We can’t even prove that Muslims are grossly overrepresented in grooming rape gangs. Based on the names of the men convicted for this crime, it is obvious that they are Muslims. This was found by Times Reporter Andrew Norfolk, the Muslim Quilliam Foundation and their report, and Peter McLoughlin, the author of “Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal”.   Drs Elle Cockbain and Waqas Tufail obviously reject this in their report.

“The racialisation of ‘grooming gangs’ must also be understood in the context of a long history of racialised and gendered Islamophobia, or anti-Muslim racism”.

Three versions of racism in one sentence!

“Muslim men have been stereotyped as both religiously fanatical and prone to committing violent, sexual acts motivated by a patriarchal, misogynistic culture and backward, barbaric religion”.

It’s called the truth! Islam is a patriarchal, misogynistic and backward, barbaric religion. Evidence for the above is mountainous and available in Islamic scripture, Islamic history, and current events.

Muslims have viewed white European women as whores for over a thousand years.


Muslim grooming rape gangs include grandfathers, fathers, sons, grandsons, uncles, nephews and cousins. What more evidence of backward views passed down from generation to generation is needed?

But there is more.

Surveys show 2nd and 3rd generation British Muslims are at least, if not more, fundamentalist in their religious beliefs than their parents and grandparents. Some of the girls raped reported that the men read from the Quran or prayed to Allah before raping them.

They also reported the men said their religion allowed them to rape non-Muslim girls and women. Most Muslims in Britain are of Pakistani descent, and Pakistani Muslim men form the bulk of grooming gang rape offenders. A list of the best and the worst countries in the World to be a woman was produced by National Geographic; the list includes 167 countries. The best are Western countries, and the worst are Muslim countries.

Pakistan was rated the worst country in the World for discriminatory norms against women. It is also 164 out of 167 in the list with only Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen below; three countries at war!

We contend that genuinely practised anti-racist feminism is vital in tackling child sexual abuse and resisting anti-Muslim forces.

Even the highly respected Times journalist, Andrew Norfolk, doesn’t escape the ire of Drs Elle Cockbain and Waqas Tufail and their accusations of racism. In addition to this report, Andrew Norfolk has been accused of racism and Islamophobia by left wing and Muslim organisations.

“……The story combined two particularly explosive contentions: that Pakistani-heritage men were preying on white British girls; and that the authorities failed to intervene ‘for fear of being branded racist’….”

So, the facts in the Jay Report on Rotherham and subsequent grooming rape gang trials in other towns and cities throughout the UK do not exist; they’re just “contentions”. A cover ‘for fear of being branded racist’ below.

“…. seemingly chosen to stoke ‘his personally crafted crime model of white victims and Pakistani perpetrators’…”

 “His dubious journalistic standards notwithstanding, Norfolk’s racialised crime threat immediately caught the media, political and public imagination and soon became entrenched”.

 Labour politicians are also in the firing line:

“Centre-left politicians have proved particularly pivotal in migrating rhetoric more characteristic of the far Right to the political mainstream. Key early contributions came from Labour MP Jack Straw. he notoriously blamed ‘grooming’ on regressive British-Pakistani culture, arranged marriages and views of white girls as ‘easy meat’…”

 Jack Straw was 100% correct – well done Jack. The Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, is especially singled out in the report and is mentioned many times. Even though she did a public “mea culpa” it was too late for the likes of Drs Elle Cockbain and Waqas Tufail; the damage had already been done.

“One particularly dramatic intervention came from Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham and, ironically, shadow secretary of state for women and equalities. Champion had to resign from the frontbench after writing an inflammatory article entitled ‘British Pakistani men ARE raping and exploiting white girls . . . and it’s time we faced up to it’ for The Sun….Her views in this article were likened to those of the far Right”.

 “The Sun’s former political editor Trevor Kavanagh, which characterised ‘grooming gangs’ as ‘the Muslim problem’: a framing heavily criticised for evoking Nazi-era rhetoric”.

I was wondering when Drs Elle Cockbain and Waqas Tufail would use the word “Nazi”.

“Consequently, the impression stood that ethnic disproportionality in ‘grooming gangs’ was an accepted fact and legitimate focus for government-commissioned research”.

 It’s not an impression; it is a fact!

The excellent book “Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal” by Peter McLoughlin is classed as far-right propaganda in the report.

The Muslim Quilliam Foundation’s report on Muslim grooming rape gangs comes in for special criticism. After all, if you can rubbish a report by an officially recognised Muslim organisation on the subject, it helps to obfuscate the problem and classify those highlighting the problem as being far right, racist and Islamophobic. Much of the input on Quilliam’s report is taken from an article written by Dr Elle Cockbain titled: “When bad evidence is worse than no evidence: Quilliam’s ‘grooming gangs’ report and its legacy”. Her article was published in the Policing Insight journal. Anne Marie and the For Britain party are mentioned in the article. Anne Marie assures me she has never used the term “Rape Jihad”.

 “The report’s 84 per cent statistic, with its veneer of legitimacy, assists Islamophobic agendas and claims of “rape jihad”: a term favoured by the likes of “Tommy Robinson” (Stephen Yaxley Lennon) and Anne Marie Waters, leader of the extreme anti-Islam party For Britain.  

Central to this is Quilliam’s 84% of offenders being South Asian (read Muslim). The Quilliam Foundation Report is dated December 2017. Peter McLoughlin, the author of “Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal” maintains an online list of those jailed to date for grooming gang rape and a ratio count of those who are Muslim. Assuming the latest date for evidence to be included in the Quilliam report was November 2017, Peter McLoughlin’s list produces 86% Muslims for those jailed as at November 2017. Quilliam took a sample of cases so their 84% is within the range of acceptance for a sample within a population. Considering Muslims are only 5% of the British population, they are grossly overrepresented in grooming gang rape convictions of predominantly white schoolgirls. That is a fact.

From Drs Elle Cockbain and Waqas Tufail’s report:

“Stereotypes of ‘Muslim rape gangs’ were greatly boosted by the Quilliam Foundation’s ‘grooming gangs’ report, source of the spurious but ubiquitous claim that ‘84% of grooming gang offenders’ are Asian”.

 “Worryingly, some academics (including the author of a book on ‘anti-racist practice in social work’) have since uncritically cited Quilliam’s drivel”.

“Information appears cherry-picked to support a central thesis that ‘regressive’ Pakistani culture drives abuse of white British girls”.

 Both Quilliam and Jack Straw mentioned earlier are 100% correct on ‘regressive’ Pakistani culture drives abuse of white British girls.

The Sikh Youth UK (SYUK) group come under fire because they also published a report on Muslim grooming rape gangs raping Sikh girls and collaborated with the left’s most hated person, Tommy Robinson.

“The fringe, nationalist Sikh Youth UK (SYUK) group then released a much lower profile but similarly shoddy report, which addressed ‘religiously aggravated sexual exploitation of young Sikh women’. SYUK had already been accused of propagating anti-Muslim hatred in collaborating with ‘Tommy Robinson’ around ‘Muslim grooming gangs’…”

 One of the subheadings in Drs Elle Cockbain and Waqas Tufail’s report is: “How the international far Right is co-opting women’s rights”.

 “Central to pan-European and indeed global far-right narratives is the presentation of Muslims as a specific and urgent civilisational threat. Far-right propaganda commonly refers to the ‘Islamisation’ or ‘Islamification’ of Europe, or ‘Islamofascism’. The ‘war on terror’ helped mainstream such perspectives and normalise the use of secular and feminist discourses to inveigh against the supposedly increasing threat of Islam in Europe”.

The Islamification of Europe, indeed western civilisation is happening and Islam is a civilisational threat. Islam is not a “supposedly” increasing threat in Europe; it is a “real” increasing threat. Women are complaining in Europe because their freedoms have been eroded by the influx of Muslim men and they have been the target of sexual assault by Muslim men.

This anti-Muslim climate has served as ideological justification for domestic and international ‘war on terror’ efforts – and the attendant wide-ranging human rights abuses – of which Muslims in Europe, the US and elsewhere bear the brunt.

 The justification for domestic and international war on terror efforts is down to Islamic terrorism and nothing else. The Muslim victim card is played yet again.

“In the Nordics, as in the UK, serious sexual offences have been racialised and politicised”.

 In the Nordics, as in the UK, and indeed in other European countries, governments have tried to hide sexual attacks on their women by Muslim men. Like everywhere in this report, the truth about these sexual attacks by Muslim men is classed as racism. People will vote for political parties that listen and act upon their justifiable concerns over immigration, Islam and Muslims.

The Jay Report into Muslim grooming rape gangs in Rotherham also doesn’t escape the ire of Drs Elle Cockbain and Waqas Tufail. They do not accept the oft quoted 1,400 victims in Rotherham. From the Jay Report itself and everything I have read on the subject that figure was conservative; the actual number was believed to be much higher. Also, there wasn’t enough emphasis on the non-white victims for Drs Elle Cockbain and Waqas Tufail’s liking when the Jay Report was covered by the press. Again, from everything I have read on the subject, the number of non-white victims was extremely small compared to white victims. Quilliam took a sample of cases so there were obviously no non-white victims in their sample.

“The Jay (2014) report received intense publicity for its (methodologically dubious) estimate that 1,400 children were abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, mostly by groups of Pakistani-heritage offenders. BME victims were almost entirely overlooked in the coverage. Meanwhile, Quilliam’s report literally whitewashed out BME victims in its sample through untrue and insulting claims that all victims were white”.

 One of the subheadings in the report is: “Fuelling anti-Muslim hostility and violent Islamophobia”. This is where the typical Muslim victim card is played. We see the usual flipping of victimhood that we see after Islamic terrorist attacks. It includes Anders Breivik, Darren Osborne, the Mosque shooting in New Zealand and the murder of an 81-year-old Muslim man in Rotherham. All of them were horrendous attacks and not condoned by any normal person. If the truth is not allowed to be told as Drs Elle Cockbain and Waqas Tufail want in their report, it will worsen the situation and lead to more violence.

The following was mentioned earlier under “failed to intervene for fear of being branded racist”. It was classed as a contention and is now a misapprehension.

“…the misapprehension that ‘grooming gangs’ flourished primarily due to ‘political correctness’ must be tackled. Decrying political correctness (usually in the context of racialised minorities) is common among right-wing and far-right commentators but detracts from broader systemic issues that require attention.

The Jay Report and investigations in the many other towns and cities where Muslim grooming rape gangs operated with impunity for decades, do blame political correctness in the guise of accusations of racism as the main obstacle to reporting on and stopping Muslim grooming rape gangs. That is a fact. Ironically Drs Elle Cockbain and Waqas Tufail’s report is replete with the word “racism” for anyone who dares to speak the truth about Muslim grooming rape gangs. We all know the great power political correctness wields when commenting on Islam and Muslims in Britain and other western countries.

The report blames the following for why offenders were not brought to justice sooner: fear that the victims would not make credible witnesses, unsympathetic attitudes to sexually exploited children and austerity measures. Among the countless thousands of victims, there would have been a significant number who would have made credible witnesses. Remember this went on for decades throughout towns and cities in the UK. The girls were treated like prostitutes who had made lifestyle choices by some police forces but that does not detract from the power that political correctness had in the police covering up these cases. Besides the police, local councils (mostly Labour) were also at the centre of this problem and they used political correctness to cover up this abhorrent crime against schoolgirls. When thousands of schoolgirls are being brutally gang raped on your patch, it should be a top priority for spending in your budget so austerity measures are not a reason why action was not taken sooner. Blaming austerity measures also smacks of a left-wing political dog whistle.

For Britain