In this episode, we discuss the prevalence of grooming gangs within British Pakistani immigrant communities, and how they preyed on vulnerable young girls. We discuss how grooming gangs spread through the community, and why the police did little to stop them.
00:00:00.000Hello, Simone! Today we are going to be talking about grooming gangs because while this is not new news, or it should not be new news because it's been going on for quite a while, there have been extensive networks of grooming gangs of Pakistani immigrants within the UK where they would take young girls and, what's the word here, essay them?
00:00:21.520You know, it's basically like he's snatching your people up, trying to rape them so y'all need to hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband because they're raping everybody out here.
00:00:31.120Yeah, well, no, basically what had happened was starting in the early-ish 2010s, this became a more pervasive practice. Basically an industry arose when selling hard drugs became a little bit too criminally dangerous.
00:00:44.740So what instead started to happen was the flourishing and growth of the purchase and sale of sexual services, but in a very not good way in that these communities, and this is one of those things where, okay, crimes tend to, I've noticed, in terms of crimes that have been committed against us,
00:01:08.600they tend to, they tend to meme their way through, often, cultural or ethnic communities.
00:01:15.580Like, just, I think like careers do too, you know, like suddenly, you know, everyone's a doctor and like, you know, there's a whole lot of-
00:01:22.220Well, I mean, you had a huge reason for it to meme its way through this community because the police weren't doing anything about it.
00:01:27.040Yes, well, but anyway, like I would just point out that like there are lots of weird, like kind of esoteric crimes that do tend to be culturally siloed,
00:01:35.660not just because you're Pakistani or whatever it could be, because you're Italian or because you're Irish or because you're Catholic.
00:01:41.240I'm sorry, Simone. I have literally, and I mean this literally, I have never heard of widespread grape gangs that were not this one particular-
00:01:51.420No, I'm referring to like completely random different types of crimes. Like, remember in the travel agency world-
00:01:59.240The point I'm making is that it counters the point you're making, okay?
00:02:02.820I understand, you're right. It is true that sometimes a crime idea will meme its way through one particular ethnic, religious, or cultural community.
00:02:13.880And you are attempting to say that is how this particular practice spread was in this community.
00:02:20.320The counterpoint I am making is I had literally not heard of widespread grape gangs outside of this one particular community ever,
00:02:32.880and yet I find it was in the countries where this religion is practiced frequently, and I find it was in the communities that immigrate from this country.
00:02:40.640Well, and that's because it correlates with a cultural dehumanization of women.
00:02:44.560Okay. Yeah, but I'm just pointing out here that it's not like an accident that there was a correlation.
00:02:48.440No, it's not an accident, and I think there's an interesting discussion to be had there.
00:02:51.860But at any rate, this became sort of a meme within this community when other sorts of crime and money-making amongst, we'll say, free radicals, like sort of young men especially,
00:03:02.280but also like married men with jobs in the community were getting involved in this, started doing this.
00:03:07.760And what would happen is you'd get like the sourcing happened with young men often like starting to date women who were sometimes like middle class, normal like women in the UK,
00:03:17.300but often, more often like lower class, down and out, like struggling young women.
00:03:21.800And they would give them, they would love bomb them, give them tons of attention.
00:04:16.300And there were literal cases of, for example, caseworkers entering homes and seeing girls beneath men in their bedrooms.
00:04:25.800And they just walked out of the room like, well, nothing, nothing to see here.
00:04:29.500Well, they also participated in the weddings and everything like that.
00:04:33.720So if I'm going to go over a few individual instances here, one victim known as Sarah was kidnapped at the age of 15, forced to learn the Koran.
00:04:41.140She was forced to, another victim was forced into Islamic dress and only permitted to speak Urdu.
00:04:47.340Another victim was forced into three Sharia marriages during her 12 years in captivity.
00:04:54.320This was someone who was captured at 15.
00:04:56.800Because some of these people were just kidnapped.
00:04:58.000In Bradford, a 14-year-old girl known as Anna was quote-unquote married in a traditional Islamic wedding that was attended by a social worker.
00:05:08.900So this is the thing that's really scandalous about this.
00:05:12.880It's that social workers and the police were aware this was happening and were doing nothing.
00:05:18.460Because they did not, like, when we talk about the way that the urban monoculture dehumanizes people of some ethnicities and treats people of other ethnicities that have been more worthy of human dignity.
00:05:29.720Like, it is genuinely a very, very racist culture in the most traditional meaning of the word.
00:05:52.240If she's consenting to this, like, she's just a trashy woman selling her body, you know, getting into drugs and alcohol.
00:05:58.620That's why, like, a lot of these girls, terrible things are happening to them.
00:06:01.800They're showing off at police station saying, help me.
00:06:03.560And they're, like, sober up and come back to us later with an adult.
00:06:06.600And then they go back out and get, you know, assaulted again.
00:06:09.700It's just, like, I think there is a classist angle to this where people-
00:06:13.520Never, this is genuinely, like, what it was like in this house during the period where, you know, if you were a white guy, you could just go out and grape black women and no one would care.
00:06:23.240Like, the black woman would go to the police and they'd be like, ha, ha, ha, that's the way things work now.
00:06:27.780And there was a manga that came out recently in Japan that is making fun of this, which is, like, the UN has ordered people from, what was it, Sub-Saharan Africa to, like, immigrate to Japan to replace them.
00:06:45.500And it starts with his mom being raped and the police station being like, oh, this is actually very common.
00:06:50.740We can't prosecute this, but, you know, they said what the people said in this case, which is, well, I mean,
00:06:56.980her testimony isn't really reliable because it's a person of the underclass ethnicity testifying against somebody of the overclass ethnicity.
00:07:06.760And I think the Rotherham Hand case shows, without any shadow of a doubt, that there is this genuine belief among this class of social workers and police that there is a deserving underclass ethnicity and a deserving superior ethnicity.
00:07:25.140And they do need to be treated differently.
00:07:27.220And crimes should, at scale, be covered up.
00:07:30.280Like, I think for people who are like, oh, no, progressives aren't like that, or, like, this isn't, like, a mainstream thing in our culture, you can point to this.
00:07:37.020And if they're like, well, they're not still like that, okay, well, now that all of this has become, like, super, super public information.
00:07:43.320And progressives will say this with public information, we'll go into evidence that it would not.
00:07:46.900On January 8, 2025, so recently, the UK Parliament voted on a Conservative Party Amendment to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which called for a national inquiry into the grooming gangs.
00:08:00.100Now, I would note here that a YouGov poll commissioned on this shows that 76% of people in the UK support this bill.
00:08:36.780Well, I actually want to hear your argument on this, because I think that part of what's going on and part of why people who should have been speaking up about this were not, kind of could be mis...
00:08:49.360Your own arguments could be misused as justification for their actions.
00:09:39.960Oh, I mean, that's where, like, so many of these girls, of course, were afraid for their lives, right?
00:09:46.660Like, some of these girls even were, for example, prosecuted for pimping because they were helping to source other young women for the men who were clearly threatening them.
00:09:57.680Oh, no, I love that you can prosecute the young white girl for pimping, not the Pakistani guy.
00:10:04.140No, but my point is that these girls were saying, I am doing this with consent.
00:10:11.000I am getting married with consent because there's, you know, they're very afraid of what will happen if they don't play along, right?
00:10:18.640At that point, you know, they're in so deep.
00:10:33.320And it's specifically a problem within Pakistani culture, and that means that extra attention should be paid to these groups when they're in the UK.
00:10:41.940Like, keep in mind, the UK isn't like the US, for example, right?
00:10:45.640Like, the UK is, like, actually the origin point of the British people, right?
00:10:52.700Like, they have a right to say other people shouldn't be coming into their country.
00:10:57.460Other people shouldn't be, you know, like, that is...
00:11:00.860Are you trying to argue then that, like, a culture can be like, y'all can't come in because you're not part of my culture?
00:11:32.020I'm just pointing out that your argument is in alignment with the justification provided by many of the policemen and caseworkers who allowed these things to happen.
00:11:56.620And I also think that a lot of it is also classist in that they were like, yeah, these slutty, uneducated girls are just going off and doing this, and it's trashy, and they're gross, and, you know.
00:12:09.360And for more context on what's happening here, because we've got more information here.
00:12:12.920So there was a guy who was arrested in Rotherham by officers of the South Yorkshire Police when he attempted to rescue his daughter from a great den, and he was arrested twice in the same night.
00:12:23.840And clearly he's trying to rescue his daughter.
00:12:48.000Under the Jim Crow laws, where, you know, it is not the same for a white man to commit a crime against a black woman as it is for a, you know, a black man to do the same thing to a white woman.
00:12:58.500Like, if a black man did this to a white woman during that period, you know, they'd just be immediately lynched.
00:13:02.800If, you know, a poor white guy had done this to, you know, Pakistani women.
00:13:08.120Well, and we know that's the case because we know of other cases in the UK, totally divorced from, well, mostly totally divorced from this issue, where, for example, academic research has been suppressed because the findings of the research.
00:13:24.700So, for people who don't know this, the academic, the reason why it's so hard to access the genetic data banks in the UK is because somebody was doing research and they just decided to look at the rates of children who are born from a father.
00:13:38.120They're having relations with their daughter because it's easy to tell from, like, genetic code.
00:13:42.600And it turned out it happened within one population at 30,000 times the rate of any other population.
00:13:48.220And they were like, oh, this is super racist.
00:21:22.640And they did this with the New York Times as well because some people were like, oh, the New York Times covered this and the New York Times covered this like three times.
00:21:29.760And then another case I hadn't even heard of, some like random death thing that they claimed was like unjust.
00:21:37.140It was like 3,000 times or something or like 500 times.
00:22:11.220For me, I think that Elon Musk has just decided around New Year's to make this a big deal to try to hold people accountable.
00:22:19.740I think it's a really interesting phenomenon that someone just incredibly wealthy and powerful can just kind of decide at some point, like single-handedly, I'm not okay with this.
00:22:42.040He's the reason why anyone is taking this current, you know, huge bout of trans research we're seeing, showing that it's like just a net negative now.
00:25:18.320They're just extremely small in number and they don't have political power.
00:25:22.500Well, one argument that's being made as well is that many MPs simply have such large constituencies of Pakistani communities that they can't really afford to look critical in this case.
00:25:37.460So many are just like, sorry, guys, but I can't participate in this and get reelected.
00:25:45.800I mean, I think you need people calling for major reform in the way the UK works.
00:25:53.120Like, with a lot of this stuff, what we need to understand is that it does not make sense to treat first immigration immigrants the way you treat existing citizens within a country, especially if that country isn't a country of immigrants like the United States.
00:26:05.820Like, okay, you're a first-generation immigrant.
00:26:30.760Everyone knew thousands of children had been basically sold into prostitution.
00:26:35.420To that point, by the way, I think there's another theme here that's important to discuss, which is people are like, well, I don't know how I could ever be a Nazi.
00:26:46.540Like, if I were in Nazi Germany, I would know, like, I was the baddie, and I would get out of there, and I would find Hitler and stop him.
00:26:57.460I mean, okay, people aren't being incinerated en masse, but you have large numbers of underage children being brutalized and having their lives ruined and being tortured, and...
00:27:15.460Well, I think in the U.S., when people are like, oh, no, I would...
00:27:19.260Like, in the U.S., progressives aren't like this.
00:27:21.240And I was like, look at the U.S. people on campuses that glorify the October 7th attacks in Israel.
00:27:28.740Where they actively acted as these people like heroes.
00:27:32.240Mainstream brands post things as they have these...
00:27:34.660Everyone knows that they're doing this stuff, and they just don't care.
00:27:39.280They just do not care if it is somebody of one of the approved ethnicities doing it to someone of the disapproved, of the lower ethnicities.
00:27:49.020And even people, and this is the thing, even people of the approved ethnicities that are like, oh, my God, like, this needs to stop.
00:27:55.860Like, they're not, like, they don't love what you guys are doing, and I think that this is the thing.
00:27:59.740People are like, oh, Pakistanis won't like that Pakistanis get arrested and removed from the country.
00:28:05.560Because then, the people in the U.K. have no reason to think when they meet a random Pakistani, oh, they're probably involved in great gangs.
00:28:13.140Because they're like, oh, this gets punished, and this isn't something that's allowed to happen.
00:28:42.460Well, it could if we get some more Luigi Mangione's up in here.
00:28:46.640I'm just saying that the longer, like, the longer that people support and cover up for institutionally unfair systems, the longer, I mean, why do we, like, know and, like, not care that no investigation has happened to the people who we know are at Epstein's Island?
00:29:09.900Why do we know and not care that, like, the P. Diddy thing can come out, and we know no one's being arrested for that other than P. Diddy, none of the other celebrities that were at these parties.
00:29:19.200Like, it's not even, like, a thing in the back of my mind that they might be.
00:29:22.280Do we just know that, oh, okay, either you're wealthy, or if you're of certain ethnic groups, and then you just don't, you know, you just punish them for crimes.
00:29:28.220Yeah, I, I don't know what to say. I mean, terrible things like this have been happening as long as humans have been around. I mean, even bonobos do terrible things like this to each other.
00:29:42.860Yeah, but typically you don't allow outsiders to come and do it to people of your group.
00:29:47.460Yeah, normally, yeah, there are mechanisms for fighting back, and I guess the fact that we have a society here where the mechanisms for defending your own from this are being systematically broken is the sign of a culture that has a very limited shelf life.
00:30:06.300Like, you're not long for this world if you cannot defend your daughters from this. Like, your culture, this is an already dead culture. Maybe that's the biggest sign here of, like, what does this mean?
00:30:17.720No, I mean, that's what I've always said the UK is. The UK is already dead, and some of our fans are like, no, like, we can fight back, then do it. Like, fix it.
00:30:25.580Because I don't see a realistic solution to save anything in the UK right now. And both of us have lived significant periods of our lives in the UK. I lived there for four years.
00:30:33.920We love the UK. Yeah. Wait, this is, like, our second episode recently where we were like, oh, crap. No, not the UK. What was the first one?
00:30:41.700What is so effed? I got my undergrad at St. Andrew's, and I got your graduate degree at Cambridge. Like, clearly we're not, like, anti-UK. We got married in the UK.
00:30:50.760But I don't see how they pull themselves out of it without a massive revolution in the country.
00:30:58.280Yeah, it's called for. But, I mean, this, again, also is not just an issue.
00:31:03.920In the UK, on this very issue, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was talking about this problem and how she covered it in her book, Prey, which came out in 2021, well, before this was ever an issue.
00:31:19.800And when she was in Europe, before she came to the United States, she lived in the Netherlands.
00:32:01.860You know, keep your girls inside if you live over there.
00:32:04.100But that's not, no, it's not just these parts of the UK.
00:32:08.600I think the problem is, is being realistic that certain immigrant groups need to be treated with a more discerning eye than other immigrant groups.
00:32:21.920And I think also keeping a really close eye on your kids and who they hang out with.
00:32:25.780I know other, other prenatalist families that we really admire are absolutely all for having their kids having friends.
00:32:32.540But they also make their houses homes where all the kids want to hang out.
00:32:36.940They entertain, they have really cool spaces.
00:32:39.680And when your kid has friends, you watch those friends like a hawk.
00:32:44.520And you know exactly what your kids are up to.
00:32:46.680And I think that that's maybe something people need to be more mindful.
00:32:50.600So we've talked in other episodes about how important it is that parents are, and siblings, are deeply involved in their children's dating.
00:34:26.780But also, I was the only minor there, and, you know, it was a pretty ballsy move on their part.
00:34:32.780And I had this argument with a college student studying biology who was also working at this ecological center that I was volunteering at for that month,
00:34:40.720who got really mad at me about safety.
00:34:45.580Because I was, like, I want to go out and do this.
00:34:47.280And, like, I want to go take the bus to the grocery store or something like that.
00:34:50.020And she's, like, you can't go out by yourself.
00:36:26.980And I guess the larger point that I'm making, though, because, you know, I had that same sort of blind opinion, is that we need to –
00:36:34.960we need to, unfortunately, dispel people of this impression.
00:36:40.340That, like, everyone's mostly nice and, like, all cultures are nice and, you know, like, it's –
00:36:47.460And I don't – I don't know how to – I don't know how to reconcile this because I don't –
00:36:51.380I mean, you and I believe vehemently in the importance of, you know, different cultures –
00:36:56.700No, I believe that these cultures will destroy themselves.
00:37:00.140I don't believe all cultures are equal.
00:37:01.780I don't believe that a culture where people will murder someone because they think that they've stolen somebody else's penis –
00:37:08.700see our penis-stealing episode – that that's a good cultural practice.
00:37:12.340I don't believe that a culture where people sterilize their children because they think that they're a different gender than the gender they were born is a good culture.
00:37:21.900There's all sorts of horrifying things that are done around the world.
00:37:26.400And they – you know, it's important that you call out when somebody's doing something evil.
00:37:30.540Yeah, I guess the importance is to defend the right for cultural experiments to exist, but to also have the right to denounce them and defend your own culture, right?
00:37:46.300You can respect people's choice to have their own experiments while equally denouncing those experiments and vehemently fighting against them?
00:38:57.280And, yeah, I also think that people who haven't been around American culture may not realize, like, how close many Americans are to snapping.
00:39:06.420Well, and I would hope – I would hope many people in the U.K.
00:39:12.080I hope that this drives people and families in U.K. to the bring, and whether this is through legitimate political means or illegitimate revolts, because I think maybe it's getting to the point where that just –
00:39:24.480Revolts aren't illegitimate when the government is immoral.
00:39:29.080But, like, something has to change before more people get hurt.
00:39:33.580A government built upon racism and viewing some ethnic group of less revering at human dignity than others deserves to be revolted.
00:39:40.860I think the U.K. government is already at the – they deserve to be overthrown.
00:39:45.380I think, honestly, if I was a monarch in Europe right now, I'd be like, ah, this is my chance to reestablish a hereditary monarchy with power in our country.
00:39:56.860Because I think, for example, the citizens of the U.K. right now would be very for that.
00:40:00.860Oh, my gosh. So, if Will and Kate were like, no, screw this. We're taking it back.
00:40:06.560Yeah, just – yeah, we decided to stop the parliament. You guys aren't doing a very good job of this whole thing.
00:40:10.560Yeah, listen, you know, this – it was a good run. I mean, technically – technically, I think the monarchy can do that.
00:43:20.900But a group of young Mormons began to popularize the use of an app that was trained on all of the older church fathers, all of the prophets, and the various biblical texts.