Gangs of rapists in the United Kingdom: London reopens the case

Under pressure for two weeks, the British government agreed on Thursday evening, January 16, to launch a new investigation into rapist gangs. Interior Minister Yvette Cooper indicated that this will focus on analyzing data on the social and ethnic origin of victims and rapists “rather than asking the same questions” addressed in previous surveys.

She thus rejected the request for a new large-scale investigation, demanded by the Reform Party (far right) and by Elon Musk, the boss of X (ex-Twitter) and Tesla, joined by the conservatives. No doubt the Labor Party felt reassured by the YouGov poll indicating that 71% of Britons have an unfavorable image of Donald Trump’s adviser, even if 76% of them supported the idea of ​​a new survey independent national report on rapist gangs.

At least 1,400 girls raped

To understand the interest of the British in the subject and their distrust of the government, we must go back to the summer of 2012. At that time, nine men were convicted of the rape and trafficking of young girls in Rochdale, in the suburbs of Manchester. Their arrest a few years earlier had revealed the existence of networks of rapists covering several cities: Derby, Blackburn, Rotherham and Preston. Their modus operandi was simple: taxi drivers, mostly Pakistanis of Muslim religion, picked up the young girls after dark.

The extent of the crimes is beyond belief: at least 1,400 of them were raped in the region between 1997 and 2013, according to a report published in August 2013. This figure increased in 2016, when a A similar, smaller affair was revealed in Telford, a small town near Birmingham.

In addition to the number of victims and rapists involved, the horror of the violence remains anchored in collective memory. “ Night after night I was forced to have sex with many men in sinister places », Testified a victim, raped from the age of 14. “ The worst moment was after my 16th^e birthday when I was drugged and raped by five men. In the following days, their leader came to my house and told me he would burn me if I spoke about what had happened. » These threats were not feigned. One of the victims died in 2000 with his mother and sister when their house was set on fire.

Years without intervention

The British have not forgotten that the authorities bear considerable responsibility for the failure to prosecute these crimes and the impunity from which the rapists benefited for more than a decade. The police, municipal councils and social services had in fact been alerted for years by numerous victims, by their schools and even by female police officers, but they had not deigned to act.

For some, for fear of being accused of racism, for the majority because they considered that the minors were consenting, according to the well-established idea that white women from disadvantaged social backgrounds were depraved, or that their testimonies would not be “unreliable”. Until the first arrests made at the end of the 2000s. The current Prime Minister Keir Starmer, at the time head of prosecutions for England and Wales, claims to be at the origin.