Julie Bindel
Appearances
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
It wasn't that the police cared that they would be called racist. We know pockets of the police are racist. We know that the police really aren't that hand-strung about it. But the last thing that they wanted to do was have to mop up after the riots.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I think a lot of people choose not to know about stories like this. And whilst we have just this complacency around the most vicious, misogynistic, sadistic online pornography easily available for 10, 11 year olds, even younger, and we pretend that this isn't educating our children into becoming violent, misogynistic psychopaths, then I think we're losing the plot.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Many British people don't want to know the truth about child sexual abuse. When we have scandals such as these rape gangs, when we have the BBC with Jimmy Savile, a prolific abuser who was abusing boys, girls, men, women, and corpses in a hospital where he worked, where we have the most horrific stories such as the one about Lucy, the other girls,
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
The stories that I've heard in court, listening to some of the testimony of the victims, also keeps me awake at night. And I think that the problem with the British public not digesting this is because we constantly monsterise these men as though they are somehow satanic figures, rather than the men that live and work amongst us, that are in families, that are seen as respectable.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And that's why I'm very cautious in the way that I depict these men. Now, what they do is monstrous. What they do is evil. But these men are able to hide. They don't hide in plain sight. They operate in plain sight. Now, I actually agree with everything.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I agree entirely, Ayaan, but you are wrong about Tommy Robinson. Tommy Robinson just tells endless lies. I don't trust him. Not at all. He's no hero. And he certainly doesn't give a damn about these girls, in my view. Really, the lies that that man has told are extraordinary. So we disagree on this, Ayaan, respectfully, of course.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
When you say feminist, I think you mean the liberal sort that do the whole sex work is work, trans women are women, stripping is good for exercise.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Absolutely right. Absolutely right. They are the cultural relativists who will bend over backwards to defend the most appalling practices of Islam. They defend Sharia courts. They defend the full face veil. They are a disgrace and they have no right to call themselves feminists. It's appalling. And I will not be lumped in with those women. And I know that you're not doing that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
The feminists, of course, but the feminists that I have been in cahoots with for more than four decades campaign to end male violence towards women and girls. We are not cultural relativists. We work across every single issue that affects women, particularly those with cultures that perpetrate the worst violence. violence against women and girls. And I would name that as Islam.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And it's the religion that gets a free pass in my country and elsewhere because it's seen as somehow untouchable, that we're not supposed to challenge it.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
We also have to look at moral cowardice and personal cowardice. So when I first published my investigation, into the grooming gangs in 2007 in the Sunday Times, the Guardian wouldn't run it.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I'd asked them repeatedly, and the editor said that we would be seen as racist, despite the fact that she knew I'm a feminist on the left and had been concerned about child sexual abuse committed by perpetrators of all stripes. But even so, there was this cowardice. And when I took it to the Sunday Times,
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
The first thing that happened that same day was I was put on the website, my name was added to Islamophobia Watch, a website that had been set up by two men, white men on the hard left, who decided any criticism of Islam or Islamists was Islamophobic. Well, I reject the word Islamophobic. So I didn't care that I was on that watch list.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
In fact, I was quite proud of it because I thought, good, I've made a mark. There were lots of women, ex-Muslim women, women from different countries living or who escaped living under Islamic rule, who were saying, thank you for publishing this.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
All of the white feminists that I knew at the time in the media, not my friends, not my colleagues that were fighting male violence, were also scared to publish it. In fact, some of them came up to me at media events and were saying, oh, oh, you know, that was... They didn't say brave. They said that was risky. I was absolutely sickened and appalled. And that cowardice remains today.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And I still, on one level, I can understand where it comes from because they've chosen to dismiss the lives of huge numbers of women that do live with these violent, abusive men that get away with it because they're seen to be somehow special. But it's unforgivable and I will never forgive it.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
What would you disagree with? I'd add misogyny. He's missed that out. I thought it was an excellent report, but he did miss that out. As I was saying earlier, these girls are seen as worthless because they're girls. And then when you add the other demographics, of course, they become even lower scum to those in power and control.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
When I was trying to interview people to write the first piece, it took me two years to on and off to do the investigation and to get to speak to people on the record who would admit to any of this. And more often than not, they would say to me,
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
well, if I'm on the record about the fact that we know that this was cultural and it was a cover up, then it will be very difficult to work within this community. And I said, how can you work in this community? They're talking about with a heavy Pakistani Muslim presence.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
When this is going on behind closed doors and on the streets, if you were to speak out, then this would clearly mean that questions would be asked.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
But as you said, we had politicians, we had George Galloway, that disgraceful human being who was a member of parliament for Bradford West, a white man who sucked up to Islamists so much that, quite frankly, I think he definitely believed he'd become one.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
who told the most outrageous lies about a woman who thankfully kicked him out of his seat, Naz Shah, who herself was from a Muslim background, who wanted to expose the corruption that had been allowed to flourish when he was a member of parliament. Because, of course, the Muslim men, the so-called community leaders, and it's interesting that
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
white people have no such community leaders, but the so-called community leaders, all older patriarchal Muslim men, would block vote and the women would be told that they had to stay indoors and couldn't vote. So the whole thing was run like a cabal. And in the meantime, the cowardice of social services and sexual health clinics There was no reason for them to stay quiet.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Many of the police were on the take. Yeah, it's true about the sexual favours, but most of them just couldn't be bothered. Like, they usually can't about sexual abuse of women and girls.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
But social workers, when they went to the homes and saw what was happening to these girls, the child, Charlene Downs, who went missing, that I wrote about, she went missing in 2003, social workers walked into a bedroom at her home and found an adult man in bed with his trousers down on top of her. And didn't report it, just thought this is what these people do, they're scum.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Maggie Oliver is a hero. I definitely would have a statue of Maggie Oliver. I know her very well. She is relentless. She set up a charity since walking out of the police in disgust that supports the victims and raises awareness. Now, Maggie gave 13 years of her life to the police, to Greater Manchester Police.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
She was tasked with getting the stories, the statements from some of the victims who trusted her eventually, because you would if you work with Maggie. She's that sort of person. And then, of course, her senior officers let those girls down catastrophically, stratospherically. And I've met these girls, now women. I've interviewed some of these young women.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
They are utterly amazing, but their lives have been pretty much destroyed by the betrayal. And one girl in particular who Maggie was trying to help by getting her statement and getting her abusers in court, she was put on the indictment as a perpetrator. when some of the abusers were on trial.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
So rather than them being on trial for what they'd done to her, she was called and indicted as a pimp, as a madam. She was a child at the time. And these girls were tasked with bringing back other victims for these men. And these men were extremely dangerous. And as we know, they've murdered girls. So you did what you were told. So imagine being let down by that. And Maggie exposed that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
She spoke about it. She wrote about it. And she now acts to change things. There was also Jane Senior, who was working... within child protection broadly, who also spoke out and she was vilified. But there were very few that did at the time. They really were so few people.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And mostly these girls, when they would go, as I said, to sexual health clinics with the most appalling injuries and diseases and, of course, pregnancies as children, We're not even supported or reported. What sort of a society do we live in where that is not actioned? It's beggar's belief.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
But for the whistleblowers, what they did, and I do include a couple of journalists in this who obviously were in a very different situation to those that were going to lose their jobs. as Maggie did, they were the ones that did what the police and what social services and what the Crown Prosecution Service were supposed to be doing and didn't.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I find Elon Musk a repellent human being. The point is that this now has happened and it is on the international stage. And so my concern as a feminist isn't to hark back and think, why won't we listen to? We're rarely listened to. We have to really push and scream and shout. And eventually we are.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
But the man that, you know, one of the wealthiest men on the planet who owns the biggest media platform, of course, is going to have a little bit more traction than we do. So it's not about that. It's about what do we do now? What do we do next? How can we keep this on the agenda of child sexual abuse and the perpetrators of child sexual abuse and the failure of the criminal justice system?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Because, of course, there are other issues that are involved. But if it just becomes about immigration, if it just becomes about what I would call a knee-jerk racist response to... Why this happens will take the RI off the endemic problem of child sexual abuse that quite frankly was there before the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs and would certainly be there afterwards.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I mean, I would like to respond in terms of the issue about I absolutely agree that term is misused, overused, used against the wrong people, used to silence constantly. I think what we need to do when we're looking at the endemic problem of childhood sexual abuse is not close the door about the lessons that should have been learned.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
for the decades that many of us have been campaigning to end it before the grooming gang phenomenon. And of course, there are specific issues relating to that phenomenon. But as well, it's same old, same old. Complacency within every single criminal justice system that you can... I mean, the incompetence is off the scale. The...
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
the lack of concern and care about the victims is off the scale and the normalisation of these crimes that are perpetrated by men is also quite astounding. So I think two things can be true.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
In many ways, the justice system has completely failed, for example, women. When we look at women being arrested or warned or given cautions for non-crime hate incidents, when you may misgender somebody on social media, it's utterly outrageous.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
When the victims of domestic violence, for example, can't get a police call-out, can't get a police officer to come to the house, where social media is being monitored, but not actual crime, face-to-face crime in the streets and in the homes. There's always a consciousness amongst those of us that try to fight and improve the system that it can be two-tier and inconsistent.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
You know, Barry, it's quite an interesting one because I think he's a terrible politician. I think he's a coward. I think he's a posturer. I don't think he'll last very long. I would say he was a disappointment, but I'm not surprised at all. I thought he would be terrible.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
But when he was Director of Public Prosecutions, although he could have done more, and of course one can always do more, he did more to prosecute crimes against children and women than any other DPP.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And in fact, I directly worked with Keir Starmer on a report that I wrote on female genital mutilation, FGM, which was being carried out and is still being carried out in private clinics in Harley Street. and where a blind eye was being turned to families taking their daughters out of the country for FGM. And he helped me with my report and spoke at the launch of that report.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
So yes, the man is just, so inadequate in so many ways. But I have to say that there are way worse than him when it comes to this issue. But he's been, in my view, quite disgraceful the way he's responded to this re-emergence of the grooming gang scandal by saying that his concern was... about an MP being targeted rather than the girls being targeted, being abused, being raped, having been raped.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I was also concerned about the MP being targeted. I think it was wholly wrong. But for him to prioritise that when he answered the question about it, what a wrong move.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I think that we have to get the abusers convicted before anything can be done, and then we can disagree on what solution there might be. But these men are not convicted. We have a rape conviction rate. in the UK, well, across England and Wales, of under 1% from reporting through to the end. So the system is in absolute disarray.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I agree with Aya and I think that Keir Starmer isn't fit for purpose in office. And I think that the Tories destroyed many of the communities, the National Health Service, the school system, you know, just many of the infrastructures were on its knees and Labour has inherited that. But I think They're not fit for purpose.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And the first thing that I would have done with Keir Starmer, because he had to respond to Elon Musk, was to say that his first and foremost concern was the victims of those gangs, past, present and unfortunately future, because there will be future victims.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
It's the right thing to do. And it's a better way to live your life. But not only that, if I think about the women and some men who are taking risks and standing up and speaking out and defying the worst atrocities in other countries, in other contexts, then it just makes me feel morally obligated.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
But also, to be honest, I get a huge amount of gratification from being amongst people and I'm a small grain in the sand on the beach of the world. who are wanting to leave the world behind a slightly better place than the one that they were born into. So I'm not going to let them bully me. I'm not going to let them stop me from doing what I'm doing.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And the tradition of proper feminism, not the liberal sort, not the fun sort, is to never, ever be cowed and bullied by the oppressor.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Well, it's a bit of a difficult question to answer about when did it start because we've had...
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
child sexual abuse organized individual in the home in public places for as long as records go back and as long as feminists and others have been campaigning against it but this particular phenomenon we can locate right back to the 90s or even earlier where we know that in northern cities and towns and villages And of course elsewhere across the UK, but we first heard about them in the North.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
there were gangs of men and they were predominantly Pakistani Muslim men in some of those particular towns, because that was the demographic of young out of work men, more likely to be involved in criminality, who had previously been selling heroin. And when heroin became too hot for them to handle, because of course the war on drugs, girls became their merchandise. And how it worked was this.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
There would be young, all young girls are vulnerable, obviously, but particularly vulnerable girls were targeted. These girls may well have had a family history of abuse or neglect themselves. They may have been in care. There were also some middle-class girls, and not all of the girls were white, but they were predominantly so.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And they would be targeted by boys pretty much of their age, in shopping malls, and parks and the like. And they got to know them and then said that they would introduce them to older, handsome men who had cars and they had alcohol and they had cigarettes and maybe marijuana. And these girls were having a great time. They were being given attention. They'd perhaps been bullied at school.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Maybe school wasn't a factor in their lives. And soon they were passed up to
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
older men some of whom worked in takeaway outlets or other traditional jobs for migrants to those towns and then of course the sexual abuse started full-on and the reason why I really try not to call them grooming gangs although often it's just simpler because it's it's a known term I mean grooming is something that I do for about a minute and a half every morning in front of the mirror and
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
It's meaningless. And these girls were targeted and these girls were raped and pimped. And what often gets missed out is that these girls were for profit. There were also sexual playthings for the men that were then going to be selling them from apartments and houses and even parks around the UK. They were trafficked around the UK, but they were merchandise.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And then what happened was in the late 1990s, in a city called Leeds in West Yorkshire, a mother called Irene Iverson, whose daughter Fiona, aged 14, had been targeted by an older man. And this was a white middle-class, very respectable family. And Irene Iverson decided that she wanted to set up an organisation, which she did, and she called it Coalition for the Removal of Pimping Crop.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Because she knew that her daughter was being sold. She knew that the daughters of many other women, many other parents were also being sold. And she couldn't get social services or the police to deal with the perpetrator. They weren't interested. They more or less said, well, if she's over 13 and it's a consensual relationship with this man, then why should we worry?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And Irene was saying to them that he's much older, she's smoking cannabis, she's staying at his house, they're obviously having sex. Nobody wanted to know. So through the organisation that she set up, that I then found out about very early on, the parents started putting together intelligence about the abusers.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And this is where they discovered, when they talked together, and none of these parents, I mean, certainly none of the ones I met, were focusing on this as a problem because of the men's ethnicity. It was because the men were abusing their daughters. So they put together information such as number plates from cars, from vehicles that picked the girls up,
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
names of these men, all other kind of information, the addresses, they sometimes followed their daughters to the takeaway outlets or the flats that they were being taken to, and then passed this information, which was quite an extensive bundle of information, to the police, to social services, and nothing was done. And there is a myth, and obviously we'll talk about this, but
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I'm sure we don't all agree. There is a myth that the police inaction was solely because of the men's ethnicity, that they didn't want a race riot, because the far right and some racist agitators in the neighbourhoods would have gone berserk when they discovered that these men were predominantly Pakistani Muslim. But a big factor in this was what I'd seen...
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
right the way through the 80s and early 90s, which was the girls were seen as troublesome slags, which is a phrase that one of the police officers used about the girl, that the girls were worthless, that they were scum, that any girl that had sex with older men for cigarettes and vodka was bringing it on herself. But also there was a racist undertone to this, which is any white girl
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
that has sex with a Pakistani is worse than scum. And so they really weren't interested because as time immemorial, girls are disbelieved and they're blamed for their own abuse. And then of course we go further on to the early 2000s when This became too big for the police to ignore.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
There were too many campaigners, too many child protection experts, too many sexual health clinic representatives saying we've got 14-year-old girls presenting with sexually transmitted infections, pregnancies and asking for abortions. So then it got too big for them to ignore and then some action occurred.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
It does check out and if you give perpetrators a message that If they rape a child, the child is the one more likely to be criminalized than him.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And if you give society a message that you can buy a child for sex, paid rape, and nothing will ever happen to you because it's so normalized through pornography and through other cultural signifiers, then it's not surprising that this is happening and happening increasingly where men are emboldened to do this. And of course, this isn't something that stands alone.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
away from other child abuse, gangs, patterns, incidents. It is specific, and it was happening in these particular towns with these particular gangs, and it was monetised. But it really was nothing new. It was just becoming so obvious that the police wanted nothing to do with it. And once, of course, the threat of rioting race rioting, as the police referred to it, popped up.